Crazy, Stupid, Love Reviews

"Wanna talk about The Scarlett Letter? Well, the 'A' they're both wearing... I think it stands for 'Asshole'. Wanna know why? Because...they fell in love, and love is for stupid assholes. And this book is just about a bunch of assholes who fell in love like assholes then had to die like assholes."

It's hard to remember the last time Hollywood begat a romantic comedy or a dramedy as heartfelt, clever and thoughtful as 2011's quirkily-titled Crazy, Stupid, Love. (two commas and a full stop?). Not a run-of-the-mill rom-com, writer Dan Fogelman and directors Glenn Ficarra & John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris) have concocted an incisive examination of contemporary love, with the film tracking a gallery of characters representing each different stage and form. The flick juggles a handful of subplots and secondary romantic storylines to fulfil its ambitions, yet none of the narrative pieces feel undernourished or short-changed. Most importantly, Crazy, Stupid, Love. is a comedy-drama that finds the perfect balance between poignant drama and quality comedy without feeling tonally schizophrenic or uneven.

After marrying young and spending 25 years together, Cal (Carell) and Emily (Moore) are faced with divorce when Emily is unfaithful. Despondent, Cal moves out and begins drowning his sorrows at a fancy local bar, where he encounters a charming, fast-talking womaniser named Jacob (Gosling). Jacob impulsively takes Cal under his wing to help him regain his manhood, teaching the middle-aged schlub to dress properly and talk to girls. But while Cal enjoys several meaningless sexual conquests, Emily finds it more challenging to move on. Meanwhile, Jacob begins to abandon his womanising ways when he gets stung by Hannah (Stone), a beautiful young girl who resists his trademark pick-up methods from the outset. Added to this, the family babysitter (Tipton) harbours a crush on Cal, but she herself is being aggressively hit on by Cal's 13-year-old son Robbie (Bobo).

In less dexterous hands, Crazy, Stupid, Love. would have been a disposable rom-com based around embarrassing archetypes and broad comedy. But writer Fogelman (Cars, Tangled) has penned a far more skilful screenplay, which is able to convey both the elation of being in love and the hurt it can cause. It deals with various forms of love, from high school crushes to young love to middle-aged marriage, and it deals with them in an honest way. Consequently, everyone should be able to relate to this movie in some capacity (unless you've been spending too much time on the X-Box). Additionally, rather than one-dimensional genre stereotypes, the film's characters are well-written, have depth, and feel like completely authentic human beings. Their decisions, actions and mistakes are depicted with an admirable realism, which in turn raises the film above less ambitious studio rom-coms. Crazy, Stupid, Love. is definitely a comedy since it's very funny, but the film is rooted in poignant themes and issues of the heart.

Prior to their directorial debut with I Love You Phillip Morris, directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa had written comedies like the hilarious, edgy Bad Santa, and their comedic instincts do wonders for Crazy, Stupid, Love.. The duo have terrific comic timing, and the picture flows smoothly thanks to attractive cinematography, buoyant editing and a playful soundtrack. Added to this, the directors afforded enough edge to the feature to ensure that it never turns into a ridiculous comedy or an overly sentimental affair. Some of the comedy is a tad broad, sure, but the humour is for the most part witty, with brilliant one-liners and snappy banter to extract a belly-laugh or a giggle. It's indeed refreshing to see something this gentle and nuanced coming out of the Hollywood factory without seeming saccharine-coated or contrived. While Cal's climactic speech is perhaps a bit too calculated, the final scenes recapture the sincerity and honesty of what preceded it. Crazy, Stupid, Love. predominantly shies away from Hollywood convention, and refuses to end on a conventionally happy note.

For an often comically-oriented actor, Steve Carell brings tremendous gravitas to the role of Cal, resulting in a performance alternating between emotionally powerful and amusing. Who would've thought that the star of such movies as Anchorman and Dinner for Schmucks could be so subtle? Julianne Moore is equally excellent - her performance as Emily is naturalistic and nuanced. Carell and Moore make for a convincing couple who share great chemistry, and their dramatic scenes together are enthralling. Another standout is Ryan Gosling, who demonstrates here what a versatile performer he truly is. Effortlessly emanating charisma, Gosling is spot-on as the womanising Jacob, and the back-and-forth between him and Carell is pure gold. Emma Stone represents another welcome addition to the cast; she's cute, likeable and believable as Gosling's love interest. Also engaging are Analeigh Tipton and Jonah Bobo, who are younger but no less convincing as teens who are naïve about the subject of love. Rounding out the main players is a hilariously uninhibited Marissa Tomei, and an against-type Kevin Bacon.

Crazy, Stupid, Love.'s message about love aren't exactly groundbreaking, but what other untapped messages on the subject are there left to convey? What matters is the treatment of the material, and in this respect the film is a home run. Both funny and romantic, Crazy, Stupid, Love. is not solely aimed at women - men can enjoy it without feeling guilty, and the movie has enough to offer both genders. In fact, this is the kind of title that I would gladly add to my collection in amidst Commando and Predator.

9.2/10

My initial reaction is that this film is the best romantic comedy that I've seen in years. The genre has been pretty devoid of quality lately. So, I don't know if that plays a part or not and I really don't care at this point. I enjoyed everything about this movie. It has tremendous heart and charisma and it's so very easy to get caught up in to the lives of these characters. A certain degree of patience is required while viewing because some secondary characters that feel unnecessary to the story are worth getting to know. Steve Carell's character is the one everyone empathizes with and when the movie shifts away from the "A" story you wonder why and start to think that the "B" story is going to be muddled or cliché or one to endure. Well, they're not and everything comes together in a wonderful fashion. The entire cast here is perfection. The overall message may be one to debate but it doesn't matter because the ride and this film are just so smart and so well done.

If the poorly punctuated and terribly uncreative title were the only problem with Crazy, Stupid, Love, the film would still have the opportunity to exploit its potential to become a great film or at least one of the better “dramedies” of late. Unfortunately, sometimes less is more, and that’s definitely the case here. The film has a terrific central conflict, ripe with all the possibilities to work (on its own) as an insightful piece on the frustrations of middle age and the toils of marriage, but my gosh, the film adds so many annoying and artificial subplots to the point that they distract us from the plot’s central issue and ultimately make for a watchable, but very much unsatisfying, motion picture. Crazy, Stupid, Love consists of one heart-breaking central conflict that has unfortunately been sandwiched between some ridiculous, mind-numbing events.

Cal (Steve Carell) and Emily (Julianne Moore) have been married for over twenty years and live in a house with their 13-year-old son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) and their younger daughter. Cal and Emily are having dinner by themselves at a restaurant, and come dessert time, Emily blurts out that she wants a divorce. She confesses to Cal that she slept with one of her work partners, and she also says that she feels like she may be having a mid-life crisis. The film handles Cal’s reaction wonderfully well: he’s shell-shocked more than anything else. He doesn’t explode or go on a tirade, like we’re normally used to seeing in other films. Both still distraught, Cal and Emily arrive home, where their two kids are being looked after by babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton), who is 17 years old. It turns out that little Robbie thinks he’s in love with Jessica. Sure, he’s 13 and she’s 17, but he reasons that, in a few years, their age difference won’t matter, and who could argue with him? Cal moves out of the house, and in his depressed state, he starts going more frequently than he should to a local bar. That’s where he meets the ostensible ladies’ man Jacob (Ryan Gosling) who seems to know exactly which lines to feed to women in order to get them to sleep with him. Jacob takes it upon himself to try to help the older Cal out of this slump and get him to start letting new women into his life.

The initial pleasant surprise is, of course, that this looks like it will be a romantic tragicomedy that features the problems of a middle-aged couple, which is something we see so rarely. But the honesty that comes across during those first 5 minutes or so soon vanishes as soon as all the other characters and subplots start entering the picture. Contrivances galore ensues. We’re asked to believe that a hunky schmoozer who’s surrounded by women at a bar would actually care enough to notice that there’s a depressed guy in his 40’s sitting on a corner in need of dating and fashion advice. Okay, that’s not so terrible so far. The next day, we’re asked to believe that a father who has just moved out of his own house and has only a limited amount of time to see his children would simply leave the kids in his apartment to go and take “lessons” from said schmoozer. Soon enough, we’re also asked to believe that a former alcoholic who is only five years sober would actually choose a BAR as a place to spend her evening. I wouldn’t be too upset if those were the only departures from reality in the film, but the problem is that they continue to spill into the film’s mostly ludicrous climax, though I can’t really keep listing them without spoiling the whole movie for you - yes, the movie is rank with falsehood throughout the majority of its running time.

The drama and comedy in Crazy, Stupid, Love simply don’t gel with one another. There’s a scene that is supposed to depict how Cal is still shell-shocked about his wife wanting to divorce him when he goes to work the next day, but it’s ruined by a completely cartoonish moment in which Cal’s boss and office partners start cheering and applauding: “Oh, it’s just a divorce?! We thought you had cancer. Haha, guys, it’s just a divorce!” I’d assume that the moment is meant to reflect the fact that people today have become nonchalant about divorce (since it’s so common), but the way the moment is played is simply too ridiculous, and worst of all, it takes away from the emotional impact we’re supposed to feel from Cal’s plight. Yet another aspect that frequently lessens the emotional impact is how horrendously predictable the picture is at times. When Hannah (Emma Stone), who has just recently passed the bar exam, is anxiously awaiting a marriage proposal from a douche-faced lawyer in a suit at a restaurant (in front of a bunch of his partners), I predicted exactly what he was actually going to say to her, and about 15 seconds before he even said it. The subplot involving young Robbie being attracted to his older babysitter had all the potential to be interesting, but of course, because it’s the type of material with which Hollywood has to be extremely careful, it’s very half-realized. To ensure that it all feels more sweet rather than inappropriate, the casting people did a terrific job at casting a kid with the shaggiest of haircuts and with the most puppy-dog looking eyes you’ve ever seen – I found it disgustingly manipulative. If you’re interested in watching a film about a teenage boy who falls in love with an older woman, I highly recommend Tadpole, which is a dozen times more intelligent a film than this.

It’s NOT that I’m saying that I PREFER movies about depressed middle-aged couples in which there aren’t any attractive young actors like Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone on screen as well. What I’m saying is that this particular film makes you WISH that it had only been about the two middle-aged characters, because they’re the only real people in it. The rest of the cast is composed of people who only exist in the world of the movies: 1) a recent law school graduate who seems to have both looks and brains going for her, yet has insecurities that the film doesn’t seem too interested in exploring on a deeper level, 2) a 13-year-old kid who seems to have memorized the book on sage of advice on relationships and shamelessly spews over-intelligent lines at the adults, who listen as if they truly believed he's an authority on the subject, and 3) a smooth-talking guy (with abs that really do look photo-shopped, by the way), whose approach to womanizing is depicted in a way that makes it all feel like a shameless succession in which girls are picked off one after the other. I’m not sure how the filmmakers believed that Jacob could be a likable character after delivering a line like “The battle of the sexes is over and we’ve won.” The women he picks up at the bars are like robotic bimbos who automatically respond positively to his flirty lines and go straight home with him. I’m not saying that there aren’t situations in which meatheads meet girls who are like that. I’m saying that the way in which the film chooses to portray them (especially in the montages in which it’s one girl after the other, after the other…) borders on insulting.

The film features one of those climactic sequences in which, all of a sudden, all the characters are together in one place and all the secrets come out. It’s the type of thing that has been done with tons of grace and wit in plenty of other films. In Crazy, Stupid, Love, all it does is give four clowns the opportunity to physically go at each other. As many problems as I’d had with the film up to this point, I certainly didn’t think it would descend into this level of ridiculousness at the end. To make matters more nauseating (yet helpfully revealing that this is nothing but a lame “white people movie”), two cops show up to break things up, and whaddaya know: one of them is Asian and the other one is black. Talk about a horrible attempt at being PC blowing up in your face due to how blatantly obvious it is. As I rolled my eyes at how fitting the title’s second adjective was for this climactic sequence in which everyone’s secrets are spoken right outside of a house, I was immediately reminded of the climax of last year’s dramedy City Island, which offered a much more fluid (and funny) version of the same type of situation. Oh, and it seems unnecessary to even mention this, because everyone will find it ridiculous, but there’s a revelation during this climax involving a character that’s laughable in the amount of contrivance it carries with it. Later on towards the end, there’s a painful sequence of scenes at a graduation ceremony that are meant to tie everyhing up, but they feel haphazard as hell. I thought I had already seen the worst graduation speech in a 2011 film after watching Jodie Foster’s The Beaver, but in Crazy, Stupid, Love, there are two such speeches that are giving it a run for its money.

There are two particular scenes in Crazy, Stupid, Love that are a departure from the film’s general dishonesty and feel like they belong in a different movie. Jacob and Hannah decide to spend the evening together, and at first, it obviously looks like Hannah’s just gonna be yet another one of Jacob’s physical conquests, but their evening soon turns into something completely refreshing and unexpected. It’s the only scene that gives Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone the chance to shine here. Stone’s charms are very much underused throughout the film, which fails to explore the insecurities that her character seemed to be going through. Gosling has been receiving an inexplicable amount of compliments on his performance. The guy has proven elsewhere that he's a terrific actor, but Crazy, Stupid, Love is certainly not one of the brightest spots in his career. He does a lot of seductive stares and half-smiling, and that's about it. With that said, though, I can’t wait to see his work later this year in both Drive and The Ides of March. The other scene in the film that works wonderfully well is one in which Cal is secretly standing in the backyard of his family’s house and receives an unexpected call from Emily. This is one rare case in the movie in which a contrivance actually works – it’s contrived that Emily stands right in front of a window through which Cal can perfectly see her, but because the scene is so good, and the two actors are so wonderful, it works. Steve Carell has already proven that he can handle serious comedies perfectly well (see Little Miss Sunshine), and Julianne Moore is one of the best working thespians yet to win an Oscar, so the grade-A quality of their performances isn’t surprising.

I’ve now seen the two films that directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa have jointly directed so far. I distinctly recall that I didn’t write a review of I Love You Phillip Morris because, after watching it, I knew that something about it was off, but I couldn’t pinpoint it, and I didn’t think it was fair to write a review if I couldn’t even figure out what it was that I concretely objected to. But after watching Crazy, Stupid, Love, I think I now see where these co-directors are failing. You see, they are making films that attempt to mix drama and comedy, but they aren’t finding the right balance between the two. All too often, the comedic element veers into the realm of silliness, and when that happens, it’s way too difficult to take the (sometimes very serious) dramatic moments seriously. Countless other films (including most of the titles on Judd Apatow’s resume) have done a terrific job at establishing that balance, but Ficarra and Requa haven’t followed their example. Steve Carell and Julianne Moore embody characters who could’ve made for a terrific exploration of a marriage on the rocks, but they’re saddled by a ton of nuisances that make the film considerably less effective. As a result of that, the insight on relationships offered by Crazy, Stupid, Love is minimal, its humor only occasional, and its overall dramatic impact very limited. Oh, and by the way, having one of your characters react to a situation by saying “What a cliché” doesn’t make the situation any less of a cliché. We're not idiots, you know?