I Feel Pretty review: As ugly as they come

Matthew Norman4 May 2018

When arriving for a film about a plump young woman plagued by self-esteem issues in a world cruelly obsessed with rigid standards of conventional beauty, anyone outside the target audience should check their privilege in at the door.

In the case of I Feel Pretty, that won’t be enough. With this abomination, the advice is to check your consciousness in at the door as well. Take a Xanax (on prescription, if you please), drink lashings of strong cider, use self-hypnosis, stay up for the two previous nights … Do whatever works for you so long as it will buy 110 minutes of oblivion.

If this raises one obvious question (why buy a ticket to a film you intend to sleep through?), the movie demands more. Did Amy Schumer read the script before signing up? If she did, was she confused by a hallucinogen, or did she come to this altered perception by borrowing its central plot device and concussing herself? Why did no studio executive step in to euthanise the project long before it reached the editing suite?

Schumer’s Renee Bennett is a clever, schlubby tech support worker for New York cosmetics giant Lily LeClaire. Stuck downtown in an gloomy basement office with a nerdy male colleague, she dreams of working at the glitzy HQ where the willowy uptown girls she idolises glide across marble flooring.

If LeClaire brings L’Oréal to mind, Renee reckons she’s anything but worth it. Small wonder there, given the endless humiliations: snotty shop assistants direct her online for what they call “supersize” clothes; her photos get zero likes on internet dating sites; an attendant calls for “double wide” shoes before the exercise class in which she splits her leggings.

STX Entertainment

All she wants is to be “undeniably pretty”. To this end, inspired by the fairground wishing scene from the Tom Hanks metamorphosis classic Big, she tosses a coin into a fountain and whispers her heart’s desire.

Behold, a miracle. She slips off an exercise bike and bangs her head. When she comes round, the reflection she sees in the mirror (though we never do, there is no actual physical change as in Big) is of the fairest of them all.

By this stage, early as it is, it is crystal clear that the comic talent responsible for Being Amy Schumer and the excellent Trainwreck, the Judd Apatow movie she wrote as well as starred in, is helplessly overpowered by the script.

This sharp, warm, hugely engaging performer gives it her best shot. But no actor in history could survive such a lethal compendium of stale observation, glib stereotyping, cheap set-ups and repulsive
scatology.

After the accident, meanwhile, it becomes equally plain that, along with wit, writers and debutant directors Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein have abandoned any attempt at coherence and credibility.

If a close friend of yours had a total personality change immediately after a head trauma, would you have to be a diagnostician in the Dr Gregory House class to make the connection? No you would not. You would bundle her into a cab and rush her to the nearest hospital for a scan.

Yet Renee’s besties (Busy Philipps and Aidy Bryant) are not remotely alarmed by her transformation from smart, self-loathing sweetheart into bitchy, moronic mega-narcissist. With burgeoning self-confidence she wows an interview panel featuring Naomi Campbell to get the receptionist’s job at HQ, where she becomes the pet of founder Lily LeClaire (Lauren Hutton) and her CEO granddaughter Avery (Michelle Williams, bravely trying to compensate for the dialogue with a helium balloon squeak).

They want to launch a downmarket “diffusion” brand for “average women”. Seemingly forgetting she is no longer one of those, Renee is thrilled to play the part of their everywoman muse.

Away from work she’s an exhibitionist monster. She’s dancing naked at the window of her flat. She’s bumping and grinding in a dance contest at a fairground bar, wowing the beery crowd and Ethan with her beauty-pageant shtick.
When she beds metrosexual Ethan (Rory Scovel), she climaxes by gazing at herself in the mirror. When she pulls Avery’s dreamboat brother Grant, he’s so bedazzled by her confidence that her claim to having soiled herself doesn’t scare him off.

I Feel Pretty

By now, the movie scene playing in my head as a displacement activity was taken from Airplane. If you found this woman in the next seat on a long-haul flight, you would have the propane and Swan Vestas out midway through the safety demonstration.

After all the virtuous messaging about true beauty coming from within, the film reserves its clinching imbecility for the denouement. Peddling that new diffusion brand to a conference of cosmetics execs, Renee gives the adorable self-empowerment speech. “When we’re little girls we have all the confidence in the world. Let’s get that little-girl confidence back. This line is for every girl.”

So then, the purpose of Renee’s voyage of discovery, the value of her learning that beauty isn’t skin deep, is to enable her to sell some skincare products. What can you say?

With its pulverising charmlessness, cretinous hypocrisies and impeccably sustained unfunniness (the hyena known to its pack as Giggler couldn’t dredge up a single titter), I Am Pretty is the polar-opposite Bizzaro World version of Big.

They should have called it Gib in honour of that, or at least as shorthand for gibberish. That or Trainwreck 2: This Time it Really is One.

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