Pretty decent
Amy Schumer’s body-image comedy hides its flaws with actor’s devoted performance
I Feel Pretty
Starring Amy Schumer, Michelle Williams, Rory Scovel, Emily Ratajkowski, Busy Philipps, Aidy Bryant and Sasheer Zamata. Written and directed by Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein. Opens Friday at GTA theatres. 110 minutes. 14A If the body-image comedy I Feel Pretty were as risky at it pretends to be, it would pursue its Ugly Duckling conceit with someone far less photogenic than Amy Schumer.
Instead it upholds the hoary Hollywood tradition of pretending that a woman turns invisible and unlovable if she’s not a candidate for the cover of Vogue or Playboy.
This is not to say the movie is unwatchable, even if Schumer’s low-self-esteem character Renee falsely feels at the outset that she’s unable to turn a single head in her direction. It’s better than last year’s wretched buddy comedy Snatched, although not as good as Trainwreck, Schumer’s first and best film laugher as lead player.
I Feel Pretty manages to sneak past its dodgy premise by getting past surface details and addressing a fear common to all people, but especially women: that they simply don’t measure up to society’s harsh judgments as to what constitutes beauty.
Renee is a regular New Yorker with a dull desk job doing online work for Lily LeClaire, a high-fashion cosmetic firm run by a social X-ray named Avery LeClaire (Michelle Williams).
Weighing a few pounds more than her skeletal aspirations, Renee joins the fitness club SoulCycle — where she’s fat-shamed by an employee played by Saturday Night Live alumna Sasheer Zamata — and tries to sweat her way to the smile and shape of her dreams.
But in the process, she gets a hard knock to the head and when she comes to, the face and figure she beholds in the mirror are the ones she’s been dreaming of, although only she can actually see them. Everybody else just sees Renee as she’s always been.
Convinced that she’s now a goddess, Renee proceeds to dazzle people — although they’re really impressed by her amazing self-confidence, not her girlnext-door looks.
Schumer redeems I Feel Pretty by completely and fearlessly buying into the premise, and delivering a few good lines that slice into the shallow idiocy of valuing beauty over brains and celebrities over common folk.
“I look Kardashian — one of the Jenner ones!” Renee says, in one of her many compliments to her sassy new self.
Writer/directors Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein ( Never Been Kissed) wisely don’t make Renee’s imaginary makeover a supernatural feat, as most movies would.
They actually send up that movie cliché by showing a brief TV clip of the old Tom Hanks movie Big, where a carnival wizard called Zoltar magically turns a 13-year-old into a 30-year-old.
Another early scene in I Feel Pretty finds Renee standing in a rainstorm, beseeching the gods to make her beautiful — but no lightning bolt strikes from the heavens as a deus ex machina for diva wannabes.
Nope, it’s just a blow to the brain that makes Renee delusional, which isn’t all that hard to go along with. And while many of the characters in Renee’s circle are sitcom-ish, they’re also endearing. These include her two gal pals (Busy Philipps and Aidy Bryant) and a shy love interest named Ethan (Rory Scovel) who is working through his own issues of self-esteem. And check the wry humour in the choice of Williams as the ditzy Avery, a casting which brings to mind her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn. That film, like this one, dealt with the pressure of public image vs. personal reality, approaching it from a different direction.
Both films come to the same happy conclusion: that physical beauty is something of far less value than the ability to love somebody for who they truly are, not as the mirror flatly declaims them to be.