In “Kinda Pregnant,” Amy Schumer has her comic fury back, and it looks great on her. So does the prosthetic baby bump that her character, a needy high-school English teacher named Lainy Newton, wears for much of the movie — though on occasion, when she runs into someone she has fooled into thinking she’s pregnant, and the prosthetic isn’t around, she’ll swap in a kid’s birthday-party balloon or even a roast chicken. That makes the movie sound awfully broad, and “Kinda Pregnant” is an overlit middle-of-the-road Netflix comedy. But there’s a pinch of emotional reality to it.
If this were just an old-fashioned high-concept comedy, it would be all about coming up with some contrived reason for Lainy to fake pregnancy, only for her to discover, in the course of her charade, that it agrees with her. “Kinda Pregnant,” though, plays it closer to the bone. The premise is a variation on “Bridesmaids”: When Lainy learns that Kate (Jillian Bell), her teacher colleague and best friend, has gotten pregnant, she feels completely left out of the party. Kate starts to bond with Shirley (Lizze Broadway), an icky-obnoxious teacher at school who treats her own pregnancy as if it were the chance to perfect a new kind of TikTok lap dance.
So Lainy is jealous. But what pushes her over the edge is the dinner she has with Dave (Damon Wayans Jr.), the guy she’s been seeing for four years. She’s convinced that he’s about to propose. (In anticipation, she’s already told everyone, which is a big mistake.) At the dinner, he talks about “leveling up” their relationship, and when the waiter brings a small heart-shaped chocolate cake to the table, Lainy plunges right into it with her hands, convinced that there’s an engagement ring inside. This is what I mean by Schumer’s fury: She makes digging into that cake a possessed spectacle of desperation.
But Lainy has got it all wrong. Dave doesn’t want to get married and have a family. He wants to have a threesome. And this shocks Lainy into a state of such humiliated rage that it’s as if we were standing right there in her shoes. At that moment, she passes through a kind of looking glass. And when she visits a pregnant women’s clothing boutique with Kate, and sees how the customers are catered to, an idea begins to form. No, she’s not going to fake pregnancy because the movie has devised some farcical motivation for it. She’s going to do it because…she wants to be treated that way. She wants those smiles from strangers, she wants someone to give up their seat on the subway, she wants to be told that she glows (and the fact that people say she does is a side joke about the power of suggestion).
But it’s more than that. As Lainy learns that the world adores pregnant women, covets them, makes way for them, treats them with TLC, the very Schumer joke is the way all of this offsets Lainy’s self-hatred. It’s as if she needs to be “pregnant” just to feel like a normal person.
Ten years ago, in Judd Apatow’s “Trainwreck” (which she wrote as well as starred in), Amy Schumer stirred things up in a most delectable way. It was a fantastic movie, a rib-tickling deep dive into the masochism of romance, and Schumer’s performance was fearless. She used her lightning quickness and cherubic features to telegraph an insecurity as profound as Woody Allen’s in the ’70s. It was a universal comedy of love and pain, and I thought it established her as a major movie star. But the opportunities for female actors in commercial comedies, especially when they’re as authentic as Schumer, are scarcer than they should be. “Kinda Pregnant” isn’t half the movie “Trainwreck” was, but it comes as close as any comedy since to giving her the pedestal she deserves.
I should mention that it’s a romantic comedy, and a pretty good one. Lainy, who is very Brooklyn (the whole movie is very Brooklyn), meets Josh (Will Forte) at the local coffee shop, and for once a meet-cute is cute in the right way. To get out of a predicament, she pretends that he’s an old friend, and the name she comes up with to call him is “Latte.” There’s something about how Will Forte rolls with that name that’s quite droll. His Josh has an out-of-the-box job: He’s the head of the Zamboni crew at the roller rink in Central Park. But mostly he’s got a freakishly normal Zen gentleness about him.
“How many weeks are you?” asks the woo-woo instructor of the mama yoga class Lainy joins. Caught off guard and unable to tabulate the weeks, Lainy ups the New Age ante and says, “We do the Mayan calendar.” The script of “Kinda Pregnant” is by Schumer and Julie Paiva (the director is Tyler Spindel, who made “The Wrong Missy”), and it scores repeatedly with lines like that. Lainy, in her grand deception, figures out early on that she shouldn’t just be saying her pregnancy is wonderful. She also needs to say it’s terrible — to acknowledge the reality of her body, to own the uncomfortableness of what nature has done to her. “Kinda Pregnant,” like “Bad Moms,” gets into confessional terrain that’s the stuff of support groups and chat sites but that doesn’t usually make it into the movies. At the same time, the film knows how to build a joke, as when Lainy’s tall tale of how she got pregnant metastasizes. (It all happened over Thanksgiving…on Black Friday…at a Costco.)
And Schumer is a great comedian, in part, because she’s a great actress. She keeps it real. When Lainy recites an Anne Sexton poem to Josh as a way of wooing him, showing us the young woman who fell in love with literature, we suddenly see the character not as a joke. A moment like that makes a difference. It tells you that even a commercial comedy that just wants to crack you up can, for a moment, be more than that, that it can reveal a bit of who we are. In “Kinda Pregnant,” it’s Amy Schumer’s go-for-broke honesty that’s funny.
