Photo: Spencer Pazer/Netflix
In Kinda Pregnant, Tyler Spindel’s newest comedy starring Amy Schumer, the comedian plays Lainy Newton, a teacher “in her 40s” — a fact that repulses her zoomer co-worker Shirley (Lizze Broadway) to the point of dry heaving. We’re supposed to hate Shirley because Lainy hates Shirley. Shirley is young and obnoxious, compulsively going live on Instagram and carrying her phone around on a little beaded leash. And though Shirley’s overreaction is a heightened moment of generational ageism, she might have a point. The next 90 minutes of Kinda Pregnant reveal Lainy to be immature, petty, and shallow-minded, motivated by jealousy and spite, not unlike Schumer’s characters in Trainwreck and I Feel Pretty and Snatched. We’ve seen these characters misbehave and embarrass themselves and express consistent disdain for other women up until they can’t get away with it anymore. Eventually, they grow up — again and again and again.
Lainy’s pregnancy insecurities drive the comedy and the tedium of Kinda Pregnant. Just as her life is imploding, her best friend and co-worker, Kate (Jillian Bell), announces that she and her drip husband, Mark (Joel David Moore), are expecting their first kid. And then, adding insult to injury, Shirley is pregnant too. It’s like everyone decided to grow up without Lainy, who is left on the sidelines with the school’s foulmouthed, vaping guidance counselor, Fallon (Urzila Carlson). When out shopping for maternity clothes with Kate, Lainy indulges a moment of perverse curiosity by trying on a fake belly at one of the stores to see how she might look pregnant, only for the woo-woo sales attendant to mistakenly think she actually is pregnant. Being pregnant, even fake pregnant, rocks — or so Lainy thinks. People help her and tell her she’s beautiful all the time. Maybe it’s a grift worth maintaining, just while she gets her life back on track.
Soon, like Mrs. Doubtfire and Walter White before her, Lainy is living double lives and they inevitably start to blur. She tells escalating and outrageous lies and hangs around with new not-like-other-pregnant-women bestie Megan (Brianne Howey), who is skeptical of woo-woo “Mamaste” yoga practices and holistic-minded approaches to pregnancy. Megan’s already had one baby, and she knows that being pregnant is mostly just a gross slog. Still, Lainy likes Megan’s clear disdain for cringey mommies-to-be, and Megan welcomes Lainy into her little social circle, which includes her husband, Steve (an always welcome Chris Geere), and Lainy’s new crush, Josh (Will Forte), who just so happens to be Megan’s brother. Hilarity is supposed to ensue, but this all just feels so familiar. A Schumer character who is self-loathing and immature, who hates herself and everyone around her. This is neither original nor specific, and we’re all a little too old to indulge this misanthropic fantasy a fourth time — especially when Kinda Pregnant also wants us to invest in its emotional stakes.
The film repeatedly feels obligated to answer for itself, sending Lainy out of her way to apologize to all the characters — the least funny bit of all. She’ll tear up, give a speech, and take accountability. Schumer plays these scenes (there are three of them) straight. She’s a solid dramatic actor; her semi-recent turn in The Humans was a compelling argument for her range. But here these beats play just too earnestly, deflating any potential humor in the film’s last act.
The laughs in Kinda Pregnant are few and far between, doled out to the film’s male performers — the aforementioned Forte and Geere — and Carlson’s Fallon by sheer force of novelty. Even Bell, an often great comedian, gets little to chew on and less to goof around about. Kinda Pregnant is Schumer’s showcase, but we all know this shtick, and the Peter Pan act wears thin. As one of her students tells her during a lecture on bell hooks, “Learning about female selves is mad boring.”
This world where everyone behaves poorly might be fun if Schumer and Julie Paiva’s script really went full silly, abandoning decorum and normalcy for the base humor (fart jokes, pratfalls, things randomly catching fire) that punctuates its scenes. Instead, these moments almost always devolve into a character telling Lainy she’s being crazy, or Lainy telling someone else they’re being crazy. The relentless finger-pointing might work if the film was exploring the ways in which we’re always judging each other. But here, these are just dry asides.
There is one scene toward the end that offers something new, wherein Lainy’s ex-boyfriend Dave (Damon Wayans Jr.) shows up for a post-breakup dinner. Though Lainy has rolled back most of her bad behavior, she hasn’t quite forgiven Dave for bailing on her. She puts on her fake belly one last time, convincing Dave that not only is her “baby” his but that there are three of them in there. Dave’s ensuing panic (“Oh, my life’s over!” Wayans wails, doing body-weight squats as Schumer leans back and smiles) gives way to the first real conversation these two have had all movie, a refreshing moment of emotional maturity. It is not really anyone’s fault that Dave wanted to be polyamorous, just as it’s not anyone’s fault that Lainy wants to be a mom. Schumer plays the scene wry and subtle. It’s the first time we’ve seen her get the upper hand in the whole movie, and the comedy that lingers between them comes not from exaggeration so much as it does truth. The moment feels unlike much of what we’ve seen until now, and it’s brief, which is a shame — it’s the funniest part of the movie.
