Let’s get this out of the way first: Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck was a crass, salacious mess in terms of its content. Schumer’s character, Amy, rolled around in more beds than a Serta mattress tester. She cursed like a Wolf of Wall Street understudy. She was, as the title suggests, a trainwreck: a life predicated on sex, drugs and taking as little responsibility as possible.
I didn’t give it a very good review. Plugged In tends to like its protagonists to be, y’know, good people. When I’m getting cramps counting cursewords and our heroine is counting yet another batch of ceiling tiles, well, that doesn’t add up to a rave review.
But trainwreck that Trainwreck is, it doesn’t take much digging to pull a kinda cool message from the wreckage.
We’ve already mentioned that Amy’s a mess. But when she’s assigned a profile to write about Aaron, a talented knee surgeon, Amy begins to see there’s more to life than quaffing vodka and slipping into another set of a stranger’s sheets. She realizes, almost to her horror, that she likes this guy.
And yet her old life continues to call to her. She’s pretty comfortable the way things are. She wants people to accept her in all her irresponsible glory. And in large part, the people closest to her do just that.
But as much as they care for her, these people—Amy’s patient beau Aaron and her suburbanite sister Kim—don’t necessarily love all her decisions. And whether they voice their concerns or not, Amy knows it. She feels judged. And so she pushes them away.
Kim never really says anything about Amy’s unhealthy habits. But in the wake of her father’s death, Amy lashes out against her. She suggests that Kim didn’t love their dad (who shared many of Amy’s bad habits). Maybe Kim doesn’t love her, either. Maybe her life—filled by a nerdy husband and goofy kid—doesn’t have room in it for a freewheeling, hedonistic sibling. Maybe there’s only room in Kim’s affections for folks who have it all together.
Not much later, Aaron admits to Amy that some of her habits bother him: her predilection for pot. Her unwillingness to compromise. The fact that she’s been with so many other men. Amy feels a little betrayed and pushes back—shoving Aaron right out the door.
Amy thinks she’s got life all figured out. And yet, she’s living it all alone.
When I walked into Trainwreck, I expected that Amy Schumer’s character would remain unrepentant through the credits. On the upside, it would expose one of culture’s most corrosive double-standards—that we forgive men for promiscuity even as we insist women stay virginal—but it would do so in the worst way possible. I feared the movie might say, hey, women should be outrageously promiscuous too!
But the movie’s core message was much sweeter, and even more responsible, than I expected.
When Amy finds herself alone, she takes new stock of her life. She gathers all her alcohol and pot, throws it in a cardboard box and gives it to a homeless beggar outside her building. (“Booze, pot, drugs and a place to live!” the guy says.) She takes steps to turn her life around, showing Aaron that she’s willing to sacrifice for him. And she visits her sister in a surprisingly poignant attempt to make amends.
“I’m broken,” she says, eyes glassy with tears.
Broken. Just like we all are.
I don’t think that Amy Schumer was trying to give us a picture of what a “come to Jesus” moment looks like, but rarely have I seen a better one.
We’re wrecks. God knows it. On some level, we do, too. Like Kim, God loves us in spite of our messes. Like Aaron, He knows there’s a better way.
We, like Amy, don’t want to change. We like things our own way. But when we enter a relationship with God, there’s a certain acknowledgement of why we’re there: We’re broken. We’re hurting. We know there’s more to life than what we’ve seen so far. We believe that we can be given new life—if we’re willing to die to our old one.
It’s not easy to do that. I’ve been a Christian for a long time, and there are still days where I feel like God and I are sitting around like Aaron and Amy, me trying to rationalize and negotiate, with God just patiently listening.
It’s easy to forget we’re trainwrecks sometimes.
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