What Happened to Amy Schumer? – Slate

Romantic comedy depends on the will-they-won’t-they lovers maintaining a delicate balance between relatable messiness—she’s a klutzy party girl who can’t sustain a long-term romance! He’s a man-boy stalled in eternal adolescence!—and a basic level of genuine likability. It’s one thing for a potential rom-com couple to squabble and wisecrack like the mismatched leads in a classic screwball. It’s something else again for them to be just … mean and dishonest, the way Amy Schumer’s Lainy is to the man she meets cute in a coffee shop in the woeful new Netflix release Kinda Pregnant. Especially given that the meanness goes only one way: Lainy’s crush Josh (Will Forte), an amiable underachiever whose low-paying yet enviable job is to drive the Zamboni machine at the Central Park ice rink, treats her with nothing but kindness and respect. But for reasons the first 30 minutes of the movie laboriously yet unconvincingly heave into place, by the time they meet again, by chance, at the home of Josh’s pregnant sister (Brianne Howey), Lainy is pretending to be pregnant as well.Why, one might naturally ask, would a middle school teacher in her 40s decide to walk around town wearing a rubber fake baby bump that she stole from a maternity boutique? Well, as established in an opening flashback, Lainy has been dreaming of becoming a mother since childhood. She and her best friend Kate (Jillian Bell) both lost their mothers at a young age; we see them on the playground at recess, pretending to give birth to their dolls. Thirty or so years later, Lainy and Kate are still besties who start their days together on FaceTime. Kate is married and trying for a baby, while Lainy is still waiting for her longtime boyfriend (Damon Wayans Jr.) to propose. When Lainy’s relationship falls apart in humiliating fashion just as Kate discovers she is pregnant, a chill descends on their friendship. Lainy tries to go through the motions of being supportive, but after she impulsively shoplifts that strap-on pregnancy belly, she can’t resist the attention and praise her new bump confers on her: strangers giving up their subway seats, other women complimenting her glowing skin. So she embarks on a double life, spending her workdays in normal nonpregnant mode but donning the fake belly in order to do things like attend a prenatal yoga class. There she meets Megan (Howey), who’s expecting her second child and anxious about sinking into another postpartum depression. The two women bond and agree to meet up again soon, forcing Lainy to continue the rubber-belly charade indefinitely—that or tell her new friend the truth, an apparently unthinkable option for this ethically challenged character.The script of Kinda Pregnant, co-written by Schumer and Julie Paiva, misses chance after chance to explore the real emotional issues raised by its highly artificial premise. Lainy is so oblivious to the needs of others, including the two actually pregnant women who open up to her about their deepest doubts and fears, that the audience’s investment in her own personal fulfillment is all but nil. Part of the problem may be that the degree of self-loathing required to decide to do something like lead a double life as a fake mother-to-be pushes the story from farce toward something more like pathology. Rather than rooting for Lainy, we worry for her: Her need to appear to be pregnant—and subsequently, to appear not to be a liar to those who believed the initial ruse—points to an insecurity so deep that the viewer wants to warn the other characters away. In a rom-com this conventional, it’s a given that the central couple will wind up together, but when Josh, on learning the truth, correctly tells the flustered Lainy that “you need serious help,” it’s dispiriting to realize that the movie has 20 minutes left to go in which she will inevitably change his mind.Kinda Pregnant is directed by Tyler Spindel, who has previously helmed three other Netflix movies produced by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions: Father of the Year, The Out-Laws, and The Wrong Missy. (He is also Sandler’s nephew.) It should go without saying that, as a straight-to-Netflix original, this movie looks crummy: flatly lit, boringly composed, and padded with those generic montages that establish a given geographic location (here, mostly various neighborhoods in hipster North Brooklyn) by stringing together a series of establishing shots of buildings.In the years between 2013 and 2016, while Amy Schumer was starring in and co-writing the Comedy Central sketch show Inside Amy Schumer, she seemed like an exciting new presence on the comedy landscape, with her blunt honesty about the near-universal female body shame induced by Hollywood’s brutal beauty standards, or her keen ear for the way women talk to each other when no men are present. (I’m thinking of the still-brilliant “Last Fuckable Day” sketch, or the all-too-accurate one in which two friends who meet in the street effusively compliment each other while reflexively debasing themselves.) For a few years there, Schumer was everywhere—hosting awards shows, getting coffee in cars with Jerry Seinfeld, and winning an Emmy and a Peabody for Inside Amy Schumer. And her 2015 debut as a leading lady in the Judd Apatow–directed Trainwreck, which she also co-wrote, seemed to augur a bright future for the comedienne in big-screen romantic comedy. The movie was a surprise hit, making more than $140 million worldwide on a budget of just $35 million.Schumer has kept more than busy in the years since Trainwreck—she’s written and starred in a two-season Hulu series, Life & Beth, and received a Tony nomination for her appearance in the Steve Martin–penned play Meteor Shower. She has done several stand-up specials (including one accompanied by an HBO Max documentary series about her not-faked difficult pregnancy) and a Food Network cooking show, and in 2021 she played a straight dramatic supporting role in The Humans, an adaptation of a Tony-winning play that, to this viewer, fell flat on-screen. But she has proved unable to establish a presence as a big-screen rom-com heroine. Snatched, released in 2017, with Schumer opposite Goldie Hawn as her mother, underperformed at the box office and earned reviews that were tepid at best. I Feel Pretty, released in 2018, didn’t fare much better, with some critics noting that the film’s script relied on the same fat-shaming humor it purported to revile. Most recently, Schumer has become a lightning rod for controversy by issuing dozens of posts about the war in Gaza, often in support of Israel.The dispiriting badness of Kinda Pregnant, a movie whose emotional climax involves a woman stuffing a whole roast turkey under her dress at a baby shower, flows primarily not from its overfamiliar material or even from its paucity of laughs, but from the way it misunderstands what made Inside Amy Schumer funny in the first place. Schumer gained a following with that show (and before that, made an impression on Last Comic Standing) because she had the freedom and fearlessness to reveal her own base instincts and self-serving motivations. In this new movie (and, looking back, in I Feel Pretty as well), her particular brand of feminist humor, which might be characterized as a form of weaponized self-hatred, feels both solipsistic and dated. There’s no interaction among the characters in Kinda Pregnant that is as emotionally real, resonant, or just plain funny as the exchange among Schumer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tina Fey, and Patricia Arquette in “The Last Fuckable Day.” That sketch was about the way women find sisterhood, friendship, and humor even in the absurdly cramped spaces the patriarchy has boxed them into. Kinda Pregnant, instead, is about a woman who, given the opportunity to help two female friends through one of the toughest experiences of their lives, chooses to steal their reproductive valor and use it to get whatever she can for herself, including but not limited to a man. True to the rom-com tradition, the film ends in apologies, tears, and redemptive hugs, but the sour taste it leaves behind feels less like victory than like morning sickness.
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Source: https://slate.com/culture/2025/02/amy-schumer-kinda-pregnant-netflix-movie-will-forte.html