In I Feel Pretty , Self-Acceptance Comes With a Price Tag

There’s a very relatable, very sad scene within the first 15 minutes of I Feel Pretty. It comes after a series of vignettes that hyperbolize the unattractiveness of its star, Amy Schumer, who plays Renee Bennett, a woman who, soon after we meet her, is called “Sir” by a good-looking guy at a drug store, is assumed to be the help, and is otherwise generally made to feel unwelcome and ignored by most of New York City. After all this, Renee gets home and strips down to her bra and her shapewear (a rom-com relic first canonized by Bridget Jones’s Diary, when Hugh Grant snaps Renée Zellweger’s “scuba suit”), and stands in front of a full-length mirror. Then, she cries at what she sees.

There’s a particular strain of self-hatred that almost every woman in 2018 has felt at least once (about her own body, her face, or whatever else) that is so potent, so cruel, so knowable, that it makes watching Schumer watch herself devastating. Maybe it’s recognizing the helplessness of how immutable your own flesh feels, when all you want is for there to be less of it, or for it to be different. Seeing another woman go through this familiar pain—and the camera closes in as Schumer’s eyes fill with tears—makes the point very easily that our lives would be improved drastically if we didn’t care so much about the arbitrary fact of how we look.

That’s I Feel Pretty’s top-level messaging, and it’s not very new. It’s even kind of rote, at this point, for loosely feminist romantic comedies, post–Bridget Jones, post-Bridesmaids, post–Obvious Child, even post–Amy Schumer’s first feature, Trainwreck—modern heroines fall in love with men, yes, but also, almost more importantly, with themselves. For Renee, it’s more traumatic than a coup de foudre: She falls off of a SoulCycle bike and hits her head, suddenly seeing herself as the most beautiful woman in the world, and thus the most confident woman in the world, brazenly picking up her sweet, dorky love interest (Rory Scovel) at the dry cleaners, and assuming nonexistent wolf whistles on the street are for her. Of course, part of the humor is that we know when Schumer says things like “Look at me now” and does a twirl, she looks exactly the same. This gag is somewhat at the expense of its star—it’s why I Feel Pretty was compared to Shallow Hal (the film in which Gwyneth Paltrow plays an obese woman whom Jack Black perceives as thin, because he’s seeing what she looks like on the inside) when its trailer first arrived. The problem with I Feel Pretty’s premise, which attempts to subvert beauty norms while definitely, definitely reinforcing them, is pretty obvious; Schumer emphasized in a recent interview that it was a deliberate choice not to show what Renee thinks she looks like as beautiful. “In the scene after the head injury,” Schumer told Vulture, “the assumption is that the woman I see when I look in the mirror is skinny, but I’m just seeing my same self and perceiving my body as beautiful. She doesn’t say, ‘I’m so thin!’ She just says that she’s amazed by her jawline, and her boobs, and her ass. If anything, that sounds like a more voluptuous woman to me.”

This claim is a little dubious, given that one of the first exclamations Renee makes is to ask Sasheer Zamata’s character, a SoulCycle receptionist, whether she looks “toned,” and to insist to her friends, played by Busy Philipps and Aidy Bryant, that she is unrecognizably transformed (not to mention the fact that the looks and bodily functions of her male colleague, played by Adrian Martinez, are an ever-present punchline). Finally believing herself to be worthy enough to work at the Fifth Avenue headquarters of Lily LeClaire, the beauty company she works for in a remote basement location, Renee becomes the right-hand woman to Avery LeClaire (a Gwyneth Paltrow/Emily Weiss–inspired, vocally charred, automaton figurehead brought hilariously to life, or, rather, a simulation of life, by Michelle Williams). Lily LeClaire, whose offices look like Coachella, or Anthropologie, is making a “diffusion line” for Target, and Renee is the only woman in the building who has ever shopped there. As Renee makes herself indispensable to Avery, who pronounces Kohl’s as “Ko-hulls” (and as if she is saying the word “ISIS”), she becomes often what a beautiful person actually is: a huge narcissist. When the spell is broken by another injury—in I Feel Pretty, self-actualization is brought about solely via head trauma—and Renee no longer sees herself as beautiful, there’s another, even more distressing scene in which she screams at her reflection in the mirror.

Though I Feel Pretty ends with a monologue from Schumer that’s ostensibly about not giving a fuck, that’s not actually the film’s prescription for women everywhere who might hate themselves a little bit—which is unfortunate, because that was once Schumer’s, early on, with her Comedy Central show, Inside Amy Schumer. After Renee realizes to her horror that she’s gone back to looking like she always has, she wakes up after a bender on the couch with ramen hanging out of her mouth; I was reminded of a beloved sketch from Inside Amy Schumer, in which, eating cold pasta from a colander at home in her pajamas, Schumer starts sexting a man who gets off on everything she says despite her stilted, hilariously unsexy responses. (Him: “What do you want me to do to you?” Her: “Tell me what all of my remotes do.”) When Schumer came on the scene a few years ago, her unaffected attitude toward the norms of femininity was infectious. She cared about being hot and cool, but not to the extent that she cared to get off of the couch. In I Feel Pretty, Schumer mounts a stationary bike enough times that I wondered whether SoulCycle had enlisted the film’s creators to create the project as an elaborate piece of spon-con.

It’s tempting to see I Feel Pretty as an extension of the comedian, but it isn’t: It’s written and directed by Marc Silverstein and Abby Kohn, the duo behind the cringeworthy He’s Just Not That Into You, which offered advice that goes something like, “[Desperate] ladies, men are telling you how they feel, you just won’t listen.” There’s one scene that feels like a life-giving antidote to Renee’s heartbreaking self-loathing, in which she enters a bikini contest with a raunchy routine set to Jason Derulo’s “Swalla.” Schumer goes all out, twerking and booty-popping and playing with the audience after essentially doing a stand-up set, and it is genuinely joyful to watch—but it’s swallowed up by the ending, and by a movie that has fully sublimated any of Schumer’s quirks into the millennial pink, corporate mainstream, and which, without giving it away, doesn’t tell us not to care about feeling pretty. Instead, it tells us that we can all care about it, not just the women who are genetically predisposed, because we can all buy into it—literally. The idea that, with the right products and the right exercise class, every type of woman can feel beautiful is about as empowering as all feeling chained to the same SoulCycle bike. It’s a vision of self-love as self-care, but it’s exhausting, and expensive. And it gets us nowhere.