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It takes a while to warm itself up, but it easily rises above the half-formed formulas of most modern day romantic comedies (which use both words incredibly loosely). It’s funny and charming in spots, yet it never fully engaged or warmed me up to it. The insistence that the entire storylines and assortment of characters tie together somehow makes it all get a bit too conventional. Tying the film down to a structure that hinders its emotional impact when so many scenes ring with devastating emotional truth and insight makes it so that the film never has a chance to recover or overcome this rhetorical bondage.
But let’s give praise where it is due, much of the cast brings their best to the material and can work wonders out of some scenes which weren’t set-up to be the big emotional set pieces. The romantic geometry at play is never really interesting since we know from the beginning that everything will end up how it should with everyone getting, more or less, what they wanted. But back to the performances: Steve Carell, like many comedians before him, is an underrated dramatic performer (see Little Miss Sunshine) who brings a tremendous amount of believability and heft to his role. Julianne Moore is always reliable, but her cheating spouse in The Kids Are Alright was a more interesting and fully formed character. Ryan Gosling is incredibly sexy, charming, sexy, able to be both dramatic and funny when needed, and did I mention sexy? He tries to make the best of the schizophrenic nature of his character, but even his tremendous gifts can’t overcome that obstacle. I have yet to be fully amazed by Emma Stone, she’s never bad and in one sequence she nails her part beautifully, but I have yet to see her do anything really special with a role/performance. The less said about Marisa Tomei, normally a reliably strong supporting and comedic performer, the better. She swings for the rafters in a film that has everyone else looking for the hurt and bruised heart beneath the comedy. She sticks out, but for all the wrong reasons.
Crazy, Stupid, Love occupies that space of good-but-not-great, which is probably one of the more frustrating places for a movie to inhabit since so much of the groundwork for a great movie was there. Maybe if I had ever for a moment felt shocked by a plot twist or thought that the central couple wouldn’t work it out by the end, I would have been more impressed and been more enthusiastic about it. But that’s the movie that could have been made, and this is the movie that was made.
