I Feel Pretty review: New Amy Schumer comedy is never as funny as you want it to be

Dir Marc Silverstein, Abby Kohn, 110 mins, starring: Amy Schumer, Michelle Williams, Tom Hopper, Rory Scovel, Adrian Martinez, Emily Ratajkowski

At first, Ethan (Rory Scovel) is bewildered by the sheer effrontery of Renee (Amy Shumer) but, like the audience, he is soon charmed by it (STXFilms)

“Look at my boobs. Look at my ass. I am beautiful!”, Amy Schumer’s character Renee proclaims in her new comedy, I Feel Pretty. She likens herself proudly to one of the Kardashian sisters. Her friends regard her with astonishment. To them, she is still the same plump and pasty faced figure with greasy, tangled hair they’ve always known and loved. Renee, though, has bumped her head. In her own mind, she is convinced she has changed from ugly duckling to beautiful princess and is brimming with self-confidence.

Schumer is a likeable and irreverent comedian – modern American cinema’s answer to Mae West. It looks early on as if I Feel Pretty will match up to the glories of her wonderful earlier feature, Trainwreck. Sadly, the film ultimately doesn’t do justice to its own intriguing premise. It is never as funny as you want it to be. You wait for punchlines that simply don’t arrive. Writer-directors Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein struggle to balance the fiercer, more satirical elements in their story with the desire to make a rousing, feelgood movie in which everyone, regardless of body shape or status, ends up happy.

The film takes some well-observed digs at the beauty industry. Renee works in a dead-end job in a foetid basement office, compiling data for beauty company, Lily LeClair. The firm is presided over by the chic, sophisticated but squeaky-voiced Avery LeClaire (a fine comedic performance from Michelle Williams). Avery is in thrall to her formidable mother, Lily (Lauren Hutton). Plans are under way to launch a new “Diffusion” product range, aimed at working women. The hitch here is that the fashion-obsessed narcissists who run the company have no understanding at all of the habits, fears or buying preferences of the “ordinary,” lower-middle-class American female. This, of course, is where Renee barges in.

Sometimes, it’s hard to work out who exactly is the butt of the joke. Early on, the film piles the humiliations on Renee. When she goes to the gym, she can’t find shoes wide enough for her enormous, elephant-sized feet. Her exercise bike collapses under her weight. Not even her slovenly work colleague, Mason (Adrian Martinez), who spends most of his time masturbating or struggling with extreme constipation, finds her attractive. They have no “banter”. When she goes on an errand to the main, Fifth Avenue offices of the LeClair company, the staff look at her as if she is something the dog has brought in.

The film itself can be cruel in the way it caricatures Renee and her equally awkward and self-conscious friends. However, for all the indignities and embarrassments they endure with their adventures in online dating, they are far more sympathetic than the skinny snobs at the LeClair company.

Renee has always wondered what it would feel like to be “undeniably pretty.” If she was better-looking, she is sure she would sail through all of life’s challenges. Her wish seems to come true. All of a sudden, after the bump to her head, she is convinced she is beautiful. It’s a testament to Schumer’s performance that she carries the audience with her. Some of the best jokes here come from Renee misinterpreting everything that is going on around her. When a builder tries to attract the attention of a colleague, she is sure that he is wolf whistling at her. When a man in the dry cleaner’s store asks her number, she immediately concludes that he is trying to ask her out, not to check on her place in the queue. At first, the man, Ethan (Rory Scovel), is bewildered by her sheer effrontery but, like the audience, he is soon charmed by it. Their romance begins to blossom. An aspiring cinematographer, he is almost as gauche as she used to be. He tells her admiringly that she is the one person he knows who is entirely comfortable in her own body.

At its best, I Feel Pretty plays like a feminist version of The Nutty Professor. There’s an obvious pleasure in seeing Renee blossom forth. She becomes so enamoured with herself that she can take on any challenge. She wows the audience when she makes an impromptu appearance in a bikini contest. In one of the film’s stranger moments, we see her having sex with her new boyfriend. Her attention isn’t really on him, though. She can’t stop looking in orgasmic adoration at her own face in the mirror.

Renee’s new-found self-confidence enables her to fit in seamlessly with the top brass at the LeClair company but gets in the way of her old friendships. She no longer has much time for those not as beautiful as she thinks she is.

As it trundles on, I Feel Pretty becomes more and more conventional and moralistic. Renee discovers that even supermodels have insecurities. Avery LeClaire, played by Williams in a fidgety but beguiling fashion reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe in one of her more ditzy roles, is full of self-doubt. She is envious of Renee’s down-to-earth qualities. We learn all the predictable lessons about beauty being skin deep. The story reaches its nadir during a final set-piece in which supermodels and dowdy working women all come together in a universal sisterhood.

“Change your mind, change your body, change your life” is the slogan of the gym where Renee goes early in the film. I Feel Pretty, though, wants to have it both ways: to celebrate glamour, wealth and conventional good looks while also arguing that it doesn’t matter if you’re the ugly duckling as long as you believe in yourself. The overall message here is hard to decipher but Schumer is enough of a comic force to help the film ride over most of its own inconsistencies.