A self-defeating, cruel comedy
I Feel Pretty
12A Cert, 110 min
Dirs Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein Starring Amy Schumer, Michelle Williams, Busy Philipps, Naomi Campbell, Aidy Bryant, Emily Ratajkowski
Amy Schumer doesn’t need too many excuses to be funny, and she certainly doesn’t need the trumped-up self-body-shaming of I Feel Pretty, her new vehicle as a producer and star. The film wants it both ways: to reject the unattainable hierarchies of the beauty industry, but also to ridicule a person who doesn’t know her place within it. The only means it can find is sabotaging its own message, which isn’t a great starting point, let alone end point, for a body-positive comedy.
Renée (Schumer) works at a highend New York cosmetics firm. She’s as far from front-of-house as could be imagined, sifting through web orders in a dingy basement that’s miles from the gleaming HQ uptown. And she hates the way she looks, trapped in a state of precarious mental health which can’t be helped by her choice of employer. But then, in what you might call a psychosomatic body swap, she gets a clunk on the skull during a spin class, and becomes convinced she has been magically transformed into a total babe.
All the confidence she lacked before suddenly floods from her in embarrassing waves. It’s the mismatch we’re meant to find funny but it does nothing. Other characters, the official megababes she found daunting as colleagues, stutter and gawp at her lack of self-awareness.
Interviewing to become the new receptionist, she finds herself in front of Michelle Williams’s lissom style princess Avery St Clair, and Naomi Campbell, who try hard to act as if they’re not judging a painful routine on Rupaul’s Drag Race. But there’s only so much eye-widening one film can use as an all-purpose punchline without seeming cheap, cruel and self-defeating.
This is the first feature from screenwriters Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, who have tended to specialise in variations on the ugly duckling myth. The titles – Never Been Kissed, He’s Just Not That Into You
– speak for themselves. But I Feel Pretty doesn’t manage an honest internal transformation of any kind. The scales fall from Renée’s eyes only after an hour of unwitting humiliation, and in the hastiest way the film can think up.
Schumer can’t solve this shedload of problems all by herself, but at least she can busy herself pretending nothing’s amiss: easily the best scenes let her openly improvise with whoever else is on screen.
It’s a waste, too, of Williams, who has a lot of bright ideas for her role – delivering her lines with a helplessly unauthoritative poo-poo-pee-doo vocal tone, and voguing ethereally as if made entirely of perfume. She’s the funniest in this, actually. Her character is mercifully free of malice: she’s so caught up in her own tense consciousness of selling a dream that she barely notices how far anyone else is falling short. The film might throw Renée repeatedly under a bus, but it’s a relief that this ever-smiling Boss Barbie never does.