The last words we hear in the new Amy Schumer movie—and I Feel Pretty is the kind of feature designed to be referred to as “the new Amy Schumer movie,” though Schumer neither wrote nor directed it—aren’t the comedian’s. They belong to a spin instructor, shouting the usual slogans about setting an intention and visualizing your goals while her customers huff and puff. The film is a studio comedy, but this megachurch-like workout isn’t a parody; its motivational mantras are a sincere expression of the movie’s mission statement. With I Feel Pretty, Amy Schumer has gone all in on Instagram quotes.
I Feel Pretty, the directorial debut of longtime writing partners Marc Silverstein and Abby Kohn, is Amy Schumer’s third outing as a toplining movie star. In 2015, Trainwreck was warmly received by critics and audiences alike as a coronation from Judd Apatow, even if its reputation has cooled somewhat in the intervening years. Despite the presence of living legend Goldie Hawn, the lazily exoticizing mother-daughter romp Snatched was … less warmly received when it came out less than a year ago.
I Feel Pretty seems fated to fall into the latter camp. Schumer plays Renee Bennett, an insecure fashion worker who lives in a New York that’s only ever existed in 1990s rom-coms. On a lowly website manager’s salary, Renee is able to afford an apartment to herself in downtown Manhattan, plus classes at SoulCycle—a brand partnership so conspicuous that sponcon is quite literally present from the movie’s first shot to its last. During one of these platitude-driven sweat sessions, Renee sustains the brain injury that gives the movie its hook: Where she once looked in the mirror and saw a Spanx-clad failure to live up to the beauty standards she surrounds herself with on a daily basis, Renee now sees a supermodel.
The movie never reveals the specifics of Renee’s delusion, but it’s clear from her reaction once the brain damage is undone that she wasn’t experiencing a sudden surge of appreciation for her own, natural looks. Renee’s ideal self looks nothing like the actual Renee, whose physical body, much to the confusion of her friends and colleagues, remains unchanged. In Renee’s own mind, she’s prettier, a subjective criterion that involves a more defined jawline and few other confirmed details. She’s definitely skinnier: When Renee wakes up in the SoulCycle locker room, she holds her hand up over her thigh, as if demarcating where she now thinks it ends; later, she gushes to some coworkers that she can eat whatever she wants “and still look like this.”
The trailer for I Feel Pretty inspired some preemptive ire for its seeming implication that women who share Schumer’s perfectly normal body type ought to feel inadequate and unattractive. (Schumer herself has addressed this impression in interviews, testifying to how much it’s colored the movie’s rollout.) To its credit, the movie makes clear that Renee’s issues are almost entirely internal, or at least internalized. Renee is obsessed with beauty in a way her blandly supportive best friends, played by SNL’s Aidy Bryant and Busy Philipps, Silverstein’s spouse, are not. Her self-esteem issues are less about what she looks like than how she feels about it.
Women in genuine emotional distress will find little solace in a takeaway as trite as “beauty is what’s on the inside,” as if self-perception is just a switch women can turn on and off, independent of any outside influence. Yet that’s exactly what I Feel Pretty prescribes its audience, via an Adichie-lite monologue Schumer delivers once Renee discovers she doesn’t have the body for a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue spread. Renee wonders when women lose the confidence they had as little girls, without pinpointing any forces or incentives that might take it from them. (Perhaps this is because she’s at a work function for the cosmetics company where she’s ascended to VP.) I Feel Pretty is content to be a feature-length Dove ad, right down to the slogan-length message: Believe in yourself, girl!
This isn’t wrong, per se. It’s just, well, basic, and maybe a little disappointing, given the type of comedy that burnished Schumer’s legend. Before she was a movie star, Schumer was the face of Inside Amy Schumer, the four-season Comedy Central sketch show that led legions of fans to associate Schumer’s name with sharp-yet-nuanced commentary on sex, gender, and relationships. A joint effort between Schumer and several collaborators, including head writer Jessi Klein, the series marked an inflection point from Schumer’s earlier stand-up, which presented her as more of a clueless, promiscuous libertine than a feminist satirist. Now, it looks like a different animal from Schumer’s post-stardom tentpoles as well. Several movies into a film career that seems to cater to a very different demographic from Inside’s, it’s worth asking: Did Amy Schumer get famous for the wrong humor? And if she did, what does that early fame mean for the rest of her career?
Bringing up the specter of a comedian’s past work can be unfair. Like all artists, and maybe even more than most, comics evolve along with the zeitgeist, and dredging up their older material too often feels like a game of gotcha!. But I Feel Pretty isn’t just a regression from Inside Amy Schumer; it’s a less shrewd treatment of almost identical themes. Over four seasons and dozens of clips, Inside Amy Schumer dealt with a broad range of subjects, from poking fun at the Schumer character’s own narcissism (“Cancer Excuse,” “Herpes Scare”) to more serious subjects like sexual assault (“Football Town Nights,” “A Very Realistic Military Game”). Still, Inside Amy Schumer rightfully earned a reputation for taking on body image, internalized misogyny, and the role social conditioning plays in both.
“Compliments,” one of the show’s first breakout sketches, helped establish the template. The joke is as simple as it is true: A group of friends respond to each other’s approval with increasingly elaborate forms of self-deprecation. When one finally gives a “thank you,” the other women are so stunned and disoriented that they immediately kill themselves. Why can’t women be confident in themselves, just the way we are? Because we’re taught that even the mildest displays of self-acceptance are out of bounds, hence the code of only mildly exaggerated faux-humility. (Unofficial sequel “I’m So Bad” intersperses performative guilt over binge-eating with offhand confessions to some horrendous stuff. Why do women care so much about being conventionally attractive? Because we’re told not being skinny is a bigger moral failing than any actual moral failings.) Inside Amy Schumer often zoomed out to target the cultural conditions that created these complexes in the first place: “Sex Tips” spoofs women’s media for broadcasting the toxic messages women like Renee take as gospel; “Last Fuckable Day” highlights American culture’s ludicrous and arbitrary standards for attractiveness; “Girl, You Don’t Need Makeup” points out just how disingenuous pop-empowerment slogans tend to be. Arguably the single most acclaimed sketch in Inside Amy Schumer history, the episode-length “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer,” is especially similar to I Feel Pretty in its desire to debunk the myths and double standards surrounding women’s looks, with one key difference: The insults aren’t coming from a woman’s internal monologue, but a gang of men callously debating whether Schumer is fuckable enough to be on TV.
Like I Feel Pretty, Inside Amy Schumer was the product of more than just its star. Comedian Jessi Klein, who’s since made a name for herself as Jessi on Big Mouth and the author of the memoir-essay collection You’ll Grow Out of It, served as head writer. Other members of the room included Tig Notaro, Tami Sagher, Christine Nangle, and Gabe Liedman—all singular voices who went on to projects that continued to garner critical acclaim, including One Mississippi (Notaro), Don’t Think Twice (Sagher), The President Show (Nangle), and Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Liedman). Another writer, stand-up Kurt Metzger, later made headlines for appearing to defend a UCB performer accused of sexual assault on his Facebook page. For the most part, though, the Inside Amy Schumer writing staff was made up of offbeat, incisive voices well-suited to social satire. In retrospect, their sensibilities may not have perfectly aligned with Schumer’s own.
Before Schumer was on Comedy Central, she was primarily a touring stand-up comedian whose persona was, in her own words, “a dumb white girl.” After her profile increased, this led to controversies over jokes like “I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual” and a routine about a fictional black friend’s name, which could be construed as either ironic demonstrations of Schumer’s own ignorance or simply shallow, stereotype-based humor. Debates over which category these bits fell into have long since subsided, and Schumer hasn’t discussed race in her act in more than half a decade. Still, there were early indications that Schumer wouldn’t always resonate with fans who found her through an aggregation of “Last Fuckable Day.”
On the somewhat outdated spectrum of hip, niche “alt” comedy to rougher, heckle-seasoned “club” comedy, Schumer’s on-stage style has always landed squarely in the “club” camp. Her routine occasionally includes jokes that could easily be Inside outtakes, like an inspired rant about the unrealistic pairing of Kevin James with Rosario Dawson in an otherwise forgettable comedy, but Schumer’s home turf is raunch, substance use, and her own lack of sex appeal. “My arms register as legs [in L.A.],” she cracked in 2015’s Live at the Apollo. “My legs register as firewood.” These hyperbolic putdowns sound like they come from a character in “Compliments,” not the woman who cowrote the sketch.
You can detect a sense of dissonance, even betrayal, in the response to later-period Schumer products like The Leather Special, the hour for which she was paid at least $11 million as part of Netflix’s A-list buying spree. “Too much of the carnal Amy, not enough of the smart, cultural critic Amy,” wrote Newsday’s Verne Gay. From the Los Angeles Times: “Ironically, the dirtier it gets, the less daring it feels.” But The Leather Special doesn’t feel like a radical departure from Schumer’s pre-mega-fame stand-up—just from the more insightful, complex parts of Inside Amy Schumer, whose overall tone was far less broad than Schumer’s stage work and far more exacting.
The same principle holds for Schumer’s film work, up to and including I Feel Pretty. Though Trainwreck’s reception was mostly favorable, it earned some criticism for a third act that treated its heroine’s partying singledom as an unhealthy lifestyle to be abandoned as soon as she found a stable partner. Snatched got harsher reads for its reliance on tired tropes like white women on vacation in a scary, less-white country and generic Latino villains. Snatched is a mess, but Trainwreck is an enjoyable, if overlong, movie; even its eye-rolling resolution is torn straight out of the Apatow playbook for delayed-onset maturity.
I Feel Pretty, too, is no more reductive than any number of studio releases before it—though that’s still plenty reductive. By now, the movie is merely indicative of the kind of project Schumer plans to attach herself to as she continues her attempts to mold herself into a bankable box-office draw: simplistic, and aiming to please the crowd rather than amuse the cognoscenti. It’s not something we’d begrudge an actress with a less decorated CV, or even another female raunch comic who fast-forwarded past the cult favorite television show straight to the popcorn fare. With that in mind, maybe it’s worth letting that disappointment in Schumer’s frustrated potential mellow out into acceptance. To paraphrase the kind of self-help books I Feel Pretty heavily borrows from: When someone tells you how subversive they are, or aren’t, believe them.
