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Movie Review: Crazy, Stupid, Love

Gregory Fichter

A multi-generational sex farce with real heart and believable characters anchored by an across-the-board stellar cast, Crazy, Stupid, Love is bound to be one of the surprise sleepers of this year. The bare plot of a loveable loser trying to win back his bored wife with some assistance from a professional Lothario – and the romantic ups-and-downs of several other characters offering a mosaic of loves lost and found – sounds like a mediocre episode of The Simpsons, but thanks to some tasteful choices and unexpected turns from the directing team responsible for last year’s naughty delight I Love You Phillip Morris, the material rises above the conventional.

Cal (Steve Carrel) is the sort of guy who wears his ratty tennis shoes everywhere he goes, including a romantic dinner with his wife Emily (Julianne Moore) – it is during one of those dinners that Emily announces her desire for a divorce. Post-split, the script wisely decides to keep the two apart for most of the film rather than offer up another chamber piece about yuppies in combat. Devastated by the loss of the only woman he has ever been with, self-defined “cuckold” Cal mopes over pink cocktails at a swank nightclub within earshot of Jacob (Ryan Gosling) – an independently wealthy pick-up artist easily bedding every woman who meets his gaze. For some inexplicable reason, Jacob makes Cal his macho makeover project – explaining the emasculating nature of drinking straws and re-fitting him with a metrosexual wardrobe. Carrel and Gosling may seem an unlikely pair for this sort of bromance, but they breathe life into old clichés with spontaneity and sharp comic banter.

While Cal sows his oats with the single women of Los Angeles, Emily fends off the advances of a co-worker (Kevin Bacon) in the most underdeveloped side plot in a movie full of them. Moore comes off as cold in comparison to Cal’s hangdog pining. No one can blame the character for being sad at the ending of a fifteen year marriage, but it is an emotional gear Moore has been stuck in as an actress for quite some time. Emma Stone, on the other hand, is a performer just coming into her own after a star-making turn in Easy A. As Hannah, a law student heading toward mundane married life with another lawyer (Josh Groban), Stone blesses the film with her gruff comic timing and off-kilter sexiness especially in an extended scene that starts as a fling with Jacob and turns into a playful-serious night of revelations and proves a turning point that will bring all of the characters together.

It is a complement to the balanced handling of multiple storylines by directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa that I have yet to mention the equal time paid to Cal and Emily’s pre-teen son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) and his obsessive love for the babysitter (Analeigh Tipton) who holds a secret crush for Cal. In other hands these developments could have gone into uncomfortable Todd Solondz-like territory but the filmmakers are more kind-hearted to their characters and prefer farce over darkness.

Julianne Moore and Steve Carell in Crazy, Stupid, Love. Photo by BEN GLASS
© 2011 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Though the movie hedges its bets with a date night friendly PG-13 rating – a fact that someone actually points out (“Your life is so PG-13!”) and finds far too many adult characters spouting “Seriously?!?” in place of epithets, the film finds a way to mostly avoid the grating juvenilia of so many romantic comedies. Crazy, Stupid, Love has the ring of truth but doesn’t reach the levels of singular artistry seen in American Beauty or Magnolia and suffers from a bourgeois ending but it is hard to not be won over by such a valiant attempt at offering something more than wish fulfillment fairy tales and slapstick pandering. See it and ignore the minor flaws.

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Gregory Fichter

Greg toiled for years in the hallowed bowels of the legendary Thomas Video and has studied cinema as part of the Concentration for Film Studies and Aesthetics at Oakland University. He has hosted the cult movie night "Celluloid Sundays" at The Belmont in Hamtramck, MI. and enjoys everything from High Trash to Low Art.

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