It wasn’t long ago that every Hollywood comedy with a female lead – usually Kate Hudson or Jennifer Lopez – was fixated on shoes, men, and/or the perfect wedding venue, so it’s a cause for celebration that in Hot Pursuit, Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara play a cop and a drug cartel informant respectively. Of course, it would have been an even bigger deal if Hot Pursuit had actually been funny, but on paper, at least, the film represents progress for women in big-screen comedy. And it’s not the only one.
In May, Hollywood’s most bankable comic actress, Melissa McCarthy, starred in Spy, a Bond-ish action caper, and she is shooting an all-female Ghostbusters reboot with the same director, Paul Feig. Also in May there was the musical comedy Pitch Perfect 2, a hit that not only centred on a female ensemble, but was directed by a woman (as Hot Pursuit was). And this Christmas, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler star in a raucous house-party comedy, Sisters. When Bridesmaids was a hit in 2011, there was talk of a new wave of comedies with women as the lead characters, as opposed to the lead characters’ girlfriends. Now that wave might finally have reached the shore.
The most interesting of the bunch is Trainwreck, which is sure to have an impact commensurate with its title. Written by, and starring, 34-year-old New York comedienne Amy Schumer, the film might be a romantic comedy, but no one is going to mistake it for a J-Lo vehicle: its heroine is foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, coke-sniffing, promiscuous, and proud of it. And yet, even though she makes Bridget Jones look like Mary Poppins, the film took $30 million on its opening weekend in the US, and Schumer is being touted as a major Hollywood star. That’s quite something when you consider how much of her Comedy Central sketch show, Inside Amy Schumer, is devoted to attacks on Hollywood.
One of the most talked-about sketches from this year’s series was entitled Julia’s Last Fuckable Day. The premise is that Schumer is out hiking when she spots Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette having a picnic. The occasion, they tell her, is Louis-Dreyfus’s final afternoon as a potential Hollywood lust object: as of the next day she will be officially too old. “You know how Sally Field was Tom Hanks’s love interest in Punchline,” explains Fey, “and then like 20 minutes later she was his mom in Forrest Gump?”
Another Schumer sketch that skewers Hollywood’s gender double-standards with the same ruthless precision, 12 Angry Men, is a 19-minute black-and-white homage to the classic jury room drama. But in this version the jurors aren’t debating if someone is guilty of murder, but if Schumer is attractive enough to have her own TV show. Lena Dunham has called the sketch “the most important thing that’s happened on TV in a long time”.
Could similarly bold claims be made for Trainwreck? Well, not exactly. As tempting as it is to declare that we are living in a brave new age of feminist Hollywood comedy, it’s worth asking how progressive each of these new female-fronted films really is. And while Trainwreck appears, at first glance, to be a daringly radical anti-rom-com, it’s worth asking why aspects of it are so traditional. For one thing, there’s that title, Trainwreck, which seems awfully judgemental of a character based on Schumer’s own stand-up persona. The character – also named Amy – might sleep around, and she might enjoy a range of intoxicants, but her leisure pursuits don’t stop her holding down a job as a senior magazine journalist, owning a swanky Manhattan flat, being immaculately dressed and made-up, or maintaining healthy relationships with her friends and family. In what sense is she a trainwreck? And would that label ever be attached to a male character with a comparable lifestyle?
It’s also notable that Amy’s hedonistic streak must be erased so she can end up with her Prince Charming, Bill Hader’s clean-cut doctor. Transformed and reformed, she gives away all her alcohol and drug paraphernalia and confesses her envious admiration for the married-with-children sister she once mocked: “I act like everything in your life is so boring and stupid,” she sniffles, “but it’s just because I can’t have that.”
Yuck. For a film that spends so much time subverting rom-com conventions, it’s amazing how lovingly it ends up embracing them.
This backtracking might not be Schumer’s fault. Trainwreck was directed by Judd Apatow, and most of his comedies begin as laid-back advertisements for unconventional lifestyles before going on to reject them. In Knocked Up, for instance, a man impregnates a woman during a one-night stand, so he has to move out of his bachelor pad, get a proper job, and settle down with the mother of his child. In Apatow’s films, conservatism always wins the day.
But if Apatow was behind the softening of Schumer’s take-no-prisoners TV comedy, she must have gone along – and that in itself is evidence that funny women in Hollywood still haven’t broken the glass ceiling. Further evidence: the climactic scene in which Amy wins back her man by dressing up in a tight cheerleader’s outfit. Schumer’s sketch show might condemn the objectifica-tion of actresses, but she has capital-ised on her own sex appeal: to the tutting disapproval of the producers of Star Wars, she has promoted Trainwreck by posing as a topless Princess Leia in GQ.
It’s still heartening that women are getting more central, more varied, and more pro-active comedy roles than they used to. But there’s some way to go. Last month, Michael Eisner, the former chief executive of Disney, made headlines when he announced that “the hardest artist to find is a beautiful, funny woman”.
But in reality, it’s hard to find a funny woman in Hollywood who can’t also be marketed as beautiful.
The Independent