In ‘rather pregnant’, Amy Schumer has her comic period back, and it looks great for her. This also applies to the prosthetic babybuil that her character, a needy English teacher in secondary school called Lainy Newton, wears for a large part of the film, although she occasionally meets someone who has fooled it with it Thinking that she is pregnant, and the prosthetic is not around, she exchanges in the birthday party balloon of a child or even a roast chicken. That makes the film terribly wide and “rather pregnant” is An overview Middle-Road Netflix comedy. But there is a bottleneck of emotional reality.
If this were only an old -fashioned comedy with a high concept, it would all be about coming up with a artificial reason for Lainy to falsify pregnancy, only for her to discover, in the course of her Charade, that it is with her Agree. “Quite pregnant,” it plays closer to the bone. The starting point is a variation on “bridesmaids”: when Lainy discovers that Kate (Jillian Bell), her teachers’ colleague and best friend, has become pregnant, she feels completely left out of the party. Kate is starting to connect with Shirley (Lizze Broadway), an Icey-Opzettered Teacher at school who treats her own pregnancy as if it is the chance to perfect a new type of tap-piece dance.
Lainy is so jealous. But what pushes her over the edge is the dinner she has with Dave (Damon Wayans Jr.), the man she has seen for four years. She is convinced that he is about to present. (She has already told everyone what is a big mistake.) During dinner he talks about ‘leveling’ their relationship, and when the waiter brings a small heart -shaped chocolate cake to the table, the with the with Her hands, convinced that it contains an engagement ring. This is what I mean by Schumer’s anger: she makes digging in that cake a possessed spectacle of despair.
But Lainy is completely wrong. Dave does not want to get married and have a family. He wants one three. And this shocks Lainy in a state of such humiliated anger that it is as if we were in her shoes. At that moment she passes a kind of looking glass. And when she visits a pregnant boutique for ladies with Kate and sees how customers are cared for, an idea starts to form. No, she is not going to falsify pregnancy because the film has devised a farcical motivation for it. She’s going to do it because …She wants to be treated that way. She wants to smile from strangers, she wants someone to give up his chair in the metro, she wants to hear that she glows (And the fact that people say she is doing is a side -joke about the power of suggestion).
But it’s more than that. While Lainy discovers that the world adores pregnant women, desires them, is assigned to them, she treats with TLC, the terribly Schumer Joke is the way this all Lainy’s self -hatred. It is as if she must be ‘pregnant’ to feel like a normal person.
Ten years ago, in Judd Apatow’s “Trainwreck” (which she wrote and played in), Amy Schumer fueled things in a very delicious way. It was a fantastic film, a rib deep dive in the masochism of romance and the performance of Schumer were fearless. She used her lightning speed and cherubic characteristics to telegraph as in the 1970s as profound as Woody Allen’s in the 1970s. It was a universal comedy of love and pain, and I thought it was an important movie star. But the opportunities for female actors in commercial comedies, especially if they are as authentic as Schumer, are more scarce than they should be. “Kinda pregnant” is not half of the movie “TrainWreck”, but it gets as close as every comedy because she gives her the pedestal that she deserves.
I have to mention that it is a romantic comedy and a fairly good one. Lainy, who is very Brooklyn (the entire film is very Brooklyn), meets Josh (Will Forte) in the local coffee shop, and for once a measuring-cute is cute in the right way. To get out of a perilous situation, she pretends to be an old friend, and the name she comes up with to name him is ‘latte’. There is something about how Forte will roll with that name that is pretty droll. His Josh has an out-of-the-box track: he is the head of the Zamboni crew on the Roller Rink in Central Park. But most of the time he has a whimsical normal zen softness about him.
“How many weeks are you?” The Woo-Woo instructor from Mama Yoga class asks Lainy. Overwhelmed and unable to set up the weeks, Leedy is the new era and says, “We do the Maya calendar.” The script of “Kinda pregnant” is Van Schumer and Julie Paiva (the director is Tyler Spindel, who made “the wrong Missy”), and it scores repeatedly with such lines. Lainy, in her great deception, finds out early that she should not just say that her pregnancy is great. She must also say that it is terrible – to recognize the reality of her body, to possess the uncomfortableness of what nature has done to her. ‘Rather pregnant’, such as ‘Bad Moms’, touches in confessional that the stuff of support groups and chat sites is, but that usually does not come in the films. At the same time, the film knows how to build a joke, such as when Lainy’s long story about how she became pregnant. (It all happened about Thanksgiving … on Black Friday … on a costco.)
And Schumer is a great comedian, partly, because she is a great actress. She really keeps it. When Lainy recites an Anne Sexton poem for Josh as a way to chase him and show us the young woman who fell in love with literature, we suddenly don’t see the character as a joke. Such a moment makes a difference. It tells you that even a commercial comedy that you just want to set up, just more than that can be, that it can reveal a bit of who we are. In “rather pregnant”, it is the go-by-brackish honesty of Amy Schumer that is funny.