Review: ‘I Feel Pretty’ Doesn’t Even Go Skin Deep

Amy Schumer puts out so much energy in “I Feel Pretty” that it’s hard not to feel charged up, too. The movie is seriously suboptimal, but she is such a force for good — for comedy, for women — and the laughs land often enough that you can go, if somewhat begrudgingly, with the messy flow. But dear lord she needs to work with better material, with funnier, sharper, far smarter scripts and with directors who can do something, anything, with the camera. There’s more cinematic intelligence in the best bits on her Comedy Central show “Inside Amy Schumer” than in her three starring vehicles.

In her last one, “Snatched,” Schumer played the clueless, often beleaguered yet fundamentally decent and finally (of course) triumphant character that is a familiar comedic type. The character was a kind of holy fool, a very weak variation on the title disaster that she played in “Trainwreck,” her breakout, a movie — notably — she also wrote. The big idea in “Snatched” is the constancy of mother love (Goldie Hawn played Mom), which is tethered to a wincing story that trades on the clichés about dangerous foreigners. It’s a clunker not least because its you-go-girl ethos is delivered through the spectacle of white women imperiled by villains with (other) accents and darker skin.

In “I Feel Pretty,” Schumer again embraces the part of the lovable not-quite-losers, women who are always trying hard to fit in but who invariably stand out because they’re sometimes falling splat on their faces. Her Renee Bennett works for Lily LeClair, a big beauty company with fancy Fifth Avenue digs. For some reason, she toils in a decrepit basement office in Chinatown with one taciturn co-worker (Adrian Martinez). Renee is an exile at work (an existential situation that worked better in Mike Judge’s movie “Office Space”), but when she is summoned to LeClair headquarters she glimpses another world.

It’s heaven on earth, or so she believes, an exotic realm filled with long-legged stunners who look like they’re cat-walking on a Paris runway even when strolling down an office hall. They leave Renee agog, none more so than the boss, Avery LeClair, played by Michelle Williams with a thick schmear of makeup and the stunned look of a recent accident victim. Working a delectably funny, unsexy squeak — a somewhat adenoidal version of Marilyn Monroe baby-breathiness — Williams slips off with the movie whenever she totters onscreen. Avery is a cartoon of conventional feminine beauty; Williams’ performance also suggests that she’s a casualty of that same convention.

There’s a kernel of a bright idea in that paradox, but, alas, the movie isn’t about Avery, or especially bright. It’s about Renee, who’s appealing partly because Schumer is and because the character has been calculated to trigger anyone who’s ever felt like one of life’s losers. That doubtless means most of Earth’s population, even if Renee’s feelings of inadequacies specifically involve how she looks, which the story largely frames as a problem of self-confidence. When you meet Renee, she is going to a class at SoulCycle — one of a number of egregious product placements — an otherwise everyday activity that she approaches with jitters and darting, I’m-so-unworthy looks at other, thinner women.

“I Feel Pretty” cannily never says that thinner is better; it’s too smart to go there. And it doesn’t have to because Renee expresses that each time she gazes — eyes shining and widening — at another woman who looks a few dress sizes smaller than she is. (She doesn’t bestow such gaga looks on her friends, played by the appealing duo of Busy Philipps and Aidy Bryant.) The story kicks in when Renee suffers a knockout blow and wakes up believing she is a knockout. The movie’s one, endlessly repeated joke is that the only thing that’s changed is how this fit, attractive woman sees herself. And because Renee now believes she’s beautiful, she easily snags a dream job and boyfriend (Rory Scovel).

Renee’s new attitude begets silliness and slapstick, and it also brings her woe as her confidence sours into imperiousness and worse. This temperament change doesn’t stick narratively; mostly, it gives Renee stuff to do and say. It also undermines the character, suggesting that she never was the inherently decent person she seemed to be. That decency is presumably why Renee has adoring, supportive friends, and it also helps temper her comic bumbling and foolishness, humanizing her frailties while pulling you to her emotionally. It’s why you’re on her side when she falls off an exercise bike or splits her pants or is effectively banished from a clothing store by a haughty sales clerk.

I’ve been there, and it’s a good guess you have, too. The idea that a lack of self-confidence can be essentially bootstrapped away — that all we need to combat oppressive forces is the power of positive thinking and a flattering lipstick — is an exhausted, false fairy tale, one peddled by (among others!) self-help books, beauty companies and, disappointingly, movies like this one.

Another filmmaker might have comically eviscerated that lie, or at least smacked it around. (The writers-directors here are Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein.) It’s clear that Schumer knows a thing or two about sexist ideologies, real power struggles and all the deeply unfunny, unpretty rest. She can go more than skin deep.

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‘I Feel Pretty’

Rated PG-13 for raunchy language and body shaming. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.