Love and Other Drugs: TRAINWRECK

Trainwreck is a sweet and salty romantic comedy loaded down with endless digressions, smirking vulgarity, stand-up dressed up as dialogue, and sudden dips into sentimental drama. If you think that sounds like a Judd Apatow picture, you’re exactly right, all the way down to the over-two-hours runtime. But here he’s working from a screenplay by Amy Schumer, who also stars. She brings her sense of tart gender politics and sly observational ear, as showcased in her hit-and-miss sketch show on Comedy Central, folding them into a movie that’s both unmistakable from her voice, and undeniably part of the Apatow approach. It starts with liberal raunch, and ends with conservative coupling, locates what it judges immaturity in its main character and finds reason to induce what it thinks is emotional growth. But at least the movie, which could easily fit into his man-child comedies’ tropes, follows a woman, and commits to telling a story from her perspective.

Schumer stars as a reporter for a magazine living a fun New York City life with lots of alcohol, pot, and a revolving door of quick relationships and one-night stands. Side-stepping the usual rom-com setup, she’s not exactly looking to settle down. Her latest sort-of-boyfriend was a hulking muscle man (John Cena) she never quite liked. So she’s as surprised as anyone else when she might actually love a sports’ doctor (Bill Hader) her editor (Tilda Swinton) has assigned her to interview. The following story finds Schumer and Hader cautiously moving toward a relationship, having fun hanging out, and eventually hitting every girl-meets-boy, girl-loses-boy beat you’d expect. But the melding of Schumer and Apatow’s comedic sensibilities makes the resulting film feel loose and shapeless, so that the big moments take a long time coming and approach from different angles, moments somehow fresh despite so retrospectively obvious.

Apatow has certainly never been a filmmaker who cuts out lengthy riffs or dawdling detours. (When it works best, like in his Funny People, there’s a fine lived-in quality.) And Schumer has never been a writer particular interested in holding back frank talk. (Her best sketches have a precise ear for unspoken assumptions.) Together, they find a nice groove, an appealingly shaggy amusement that’s always going where you suspect it is, but unhurried about getting there. This accommodates all sorts of digressions in a textured approach to what other films would play for easy shock humor or manipulative sentiment (although there’s that, too). Though Schumer and Hader have a warm, relaxed chemistry, which sells their rom-com paces, the film’s length and pokiness allows for a wider understanding of her character. We get just as much time with sneakily moving, and frankly more interesting, prickly relationships with her sick father (Colin Quinn) and married sister (Brie Larson).

Could every single scene be shorter, and cut more tightly? Yes. But then the movie would lose some of the rambling quality that drifts it away from formula and into its characters lives. Cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes (HBO’s Girls) finds casual beauty to their New York existences, from spacious apartments to cramped subways, while the movie meanders along, exploring a deep bench of side characters, caricatures and cameos all. We meet a gaggle of magazine employees (Vanessa Bayer, Randall Park, Jon Glaser, and Ezra Miller), a senile elderly man (Norman Lloyd), a homeless guy (Dave Atell), suburbanites (including Mike Birbiglia, Tim Meadows, and Nikki Glaser), and LeBron James (as himself). They’re all mostly inessential to the overarching narrative (especially an even weirder batch of celebrity appearances near the end), but irreplaceable for the windows into Schumer and Hader’s lives outside the romantic comedy world in which they’re living.

Because this is a more expansive ramble than most comedies attempt, there’s small disappointment in finding it settle back into formulaic moments. But how often do you get to see a rom-com these days, especially one so intent on fully fleshing in its characters outside their interactions with each other? And rarer still are the movies told so persuasively from a woman’s point of view, placing an obvious and welcome focus on her pleasure, her opinions, and her complicated evolving decisions. (It also flips the usual romance gender dynamics, making her the commitment-phobe, and he the one ready to settle down.) There’s a sting of earnest truthfulness in Schumer’s framing of familial and romantic relationships, tired wisdom where people grow together or apart for understandable, relatable reasons instead of flailing sitcom misunderstanding. Here’s a movie broad enough to support goofy sex scenes and big silly behavior, while containing it within a believable emotional world. That it’s uneven comes with the territory.

Love, Cancer Style: THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

They’re young. They’re in love. They have cancer. She meets him in a support group for kids with terminal illnesses. She needs an oxygen tank to breathe. He has an artificial leg. They’re in remission, but for God only knows how long. She’s only alive because of an experimental treatment. No one knows if and when it’ll stop working. He’s only alive because he gave up part of his leg. They hit it off right away. Their chemistry is immediate, obvious, and overwhelming. They feel comfortable together. Maybe it’s because for them love means never having to say you have cancer.

That’s the basic premise of The Fault in Our Stars, a teen romance wrapped tightly around a disease-of-the-week weepy. What makes it work is the strength of the performances, which are clear-eyed and emphatic, and the writing, which is sappy and sentimental, but never loses a sense of humor and perspective. This isn’t a blinkered story of doomed true love. It’s a story about two sick kids who make a connection in what just might be their final days. Rather than letting this possibility weigh the film down, it’s simply accepted as a reality. They’ve been living with their diagnoses for years now. They’re used to it.

The girl, Hazel, is our entry point into the story. Played by Shailene Woodley, she’s a bookish, contemplative girl who appreciates the time she’s given, while wondering why she can’t have the freedom to be a little more of a normal teen. She certainly doesn’t want to go to the support group in the bottom of a church basement, where the sweet man with testicular cancer (Mike Birbiglia) makes everyone listen to his acoustic guitar playing. She goes anyway, and meets Augustus (Ansel Elgort). They can’t keep their eyes off of each other. Afterwards, they hang out. Soon, they text back and forth. It’s a typical modern teen flirtation sliding easily into romance. If it weren’t for the cancer, it’d almost not be worth telling. The disease gives their flirtation underlying, unspoken, urgency.

Woodley and Elgort’s performances are appealing and comfortable. Woodley makes even the corniest narration sound like nothing more than what a reasonably intelligent teenager might be thinking. She has an open face and wet eyes that communicate a sadness and wonder, convincing as a person who has been sick since she was a child, and is tentatively forging a new relationship despite her worry about hurting one more person with her death. Elgort’s hugely charming, playing the type of cocky that can only be compensating for fear. And yet he seems totally at ease. He has to be the dreamiest, most Tiger Beat-ready cancer patient I’ve ever seen, confident and glowing with a love of life. They look good together, banter well, and are easy to root for.

The supporting cast is filled with terrific actors as parents and fellow support group members. Laura Dern is especially good in a role of maternal warmth and care as a woman for whom caring for a terminal child has become second nature. She has a devastating flashback scene, weeping while trying to comfort her hospitalized daughter, that’s so good it’s repeated twice. Nat Wolff, who between this and Palo Alto is cornering the market on troubled-best-friend teen roles, plays a kid with cancer of the eyes, nervously awaiting surgery that’ll leave him blind. That he’s good comedic relief should tell you something about the movie’s approach. It’s not morose or death-obsessed. It’s about people living their lives one day at a time complete with tiny triumphs, interesting anecdotes, sad setbacks, and funny jokes.

There’s nothing visually interesting about the movie. It’s simply lit and full of medium and close-up two shots, what we’d more easily call TV-like before TV went and got a smidge more cinematic at its upper edge. Director Josh Boone gets fine performances out of his cast and keeps the style merely functional, stepping out of the material’s way. It’s based on a popular novel by John Green, who wrote a well-oiled melodrama machine. I mean that in a good way. Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (of (500) Days of Summer and The Spectacular Now) retain its most appealing elements, faithfully flavoring a low-key and sympathetic story about families living with a sick child with fantasy romance elements. The main characters have an idealized perfect teen love that’s all the more intense for the cold reality of cancer potentially growing within them.

The movie has a brisk pace, humanizing detail, and a good-humored snap to the dialogue. It hits metaphors a little too hard – a scene drawing a parallel to Anne Frank is misjudged – but, in its simple scenes of characters interacting, it is often deeply felt. It’s gooey, sappy at times, intent on wringing a tear or two out of the audience. But it’s warm, appealing, and never loses sight of the characters, balancing their youthful vitality and the deadly stakes of their conditions. Most importantly, they’re rarely reduced to their types. They’re presented as people who laugh, dream, plan, hope, think, and love. They try not to let their disease define them. That the movie doesn’t either is to its credit. And that’s what makes this glossy, bright, manipulative Hollywood drama an engaging entertainment that can hit authentic, tearful notes.

Quick Looks: ARBITRAGE, THE GOOD DOCTOR, and SLEEPWALK WITH ME

In Arbitrage, Richard Gere plays a hugely wealthy banker in some serious trouble. He’s become embroiled in a complicated financial deal that’s threatening to sink his company if the funds don’t get moved around quickly enough to cover his assets. And that’s not even the worst of it. He sneaks away from his wife (Susan Sarandon) to drive upstate with his mistress (Laetitia Casta) and ends up flipping the car. When he comes to, he sees that his mistress is dead in the passenger seat so he flees the scene of the accident. (The pointed intent couldn’t be clearer: the rich flee catastrophe on instinct.) So he’s dealing with financial trouble and legal trouble, skulking around large boardrooms, spacious offices, and fancy apartments, trying to avoid the consequences of his actions.

Writer-director Nicholas Jarecki has created a phony fantasy of a character study that feels altogether too calculated a guesstimate of how the one-percent lives. (Not that I have any experience with that income bracket, but it can’t be as simple as it’s made to seem here.) To put such material in a standard thriller (the kind with dramatic turns that make it play like an episode of Law & Order from the suspect’s point-of-view) only cheapens what was sparsely drawn to begin with. It should be juicier and with more of a bite; it’s all strangely toothless. That said, Gere gives a persuasive performance of a man crumbling under the burden of keeping up appearances. I also appreciated the work of Nate Parker, as a working-class man Gere debates scapegoating, and Tim Roth, as the investigator who is frustrated that the legal system seems rigged in favor the rich. Would that these performances were in a movie that would be able to better show them off.

Director Lance Daly’s The Good Doctor is a squirmy thriller about a lonely young doctor (Orlando Bloom) who falls in love (no, obsession) with a pretty patient (Riley Keough). He decides to tweak her medication in order to keep her in the hospital under his care. The script by John Enborn follows this situation to its predictable conclusion and the talented supporting cast (including Taraji P. Henson, Michael Peña, and J.K. Simmons) fills out the plot convincingly enough. It’s a shame, then, that the whole experience is just a sad, slow circle down the drain, completely without tension and devoid of emotional interest. This is a thinly imagined thriller that manages nothing more than a queasy feeling once or twice. It’s most unfulfilling in its flat visual style and ploddingly obvious script. As someone who sort of enjoyed Daly’s similarly slight first feature, the kids-in-puppy-love romance Kisses, I’m especially disappointed to see that this is where he’s gone next. He’s a director of potential and maybe someday he’ll live up to it.

Stand-up comedian Mike Birbiglia has told the same – very funny – story in several mediums now. If you’re anything like me, you may have managed to hear several times over (in his stand-up, on This American Life, in his memoir) about his intense sleepwalking problem that caused him to, say, dream about a jackal intruding in his bedroom, which would result in him fast asleep shouting at a hamper, fully convinced he was confronting a wild animal. This is obviously a problem, but his career seemed to be taking off and his relationship with his girlfriend was growing complicated and one thing leads to another and he’s in a deep sleep while jumping out a second-story hotel window.

This story’s latest telling takes movie form in Sleepwalk with Me and it’s perfectly fine, though I did wonder if it would have worked better on me if the novelty was still there. Birbiglia, here the writer, director and star, has a loose, casual style that pumps up dream sequences with off-hand discombobulation that is undercut with silly shifts to reality. To fill out the rest of the semi-autobiographical movie, it follows Birbiglia’s relationship with his girlfriend (played by Lauren Ambrose) as well as his growing stand-up career that takes him from hotel to hotel, crummy gig to crummy gig. Altogether it plays like Woody Allen lite, warm and sweetly small. This is a minor, but often charming movie, mostly because Birbiglia is so likable. But the thing of it is, you’d have just as good a time listening to the original monologue, so I have a hard time recommending this movie outright.