Rom-coms have a problem with sugar. Rom-coms have a problem with empty crowd-pleasing, like the cringe-inducing cliché where the climax takes place in public so a crowd of strangers – standing in for the audience – can spontaneously applaud our hero’s declaration of love, or earnest speech about having seen the light or whatever. Crazy, Stupid, Love edges close to both those problems. I’d have liked this rom-com to be just a little edgier, like previous films – Bad Santa and I Love You, Phillip Morris – written by directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (though admittedly they didn’t write this one). Still, it seems churlish to complain about a film so joyously witty. Of its type – inhabiting the niche where giddy farce meets airy relationship comedy – it may be the best thing to come down the pike since Flirting With Disaster 15 years ago.
Is it even a rom-com? A friend I watched it with reckons it’s a ‘dramedy’ – and I don’t agree, but that label may explain why it feels so different to most multiplex comedies. Compare, for instance, the scene in Hall Pass where a middle-aged man gives a teenage babysitter a ride home with the similar scene in this one. In Hall Pass, she invites him to buy some booze (she’s underage) and join her down by the lake; he thinks she means just the two of them, and assumes she’s got a crush on him; she, looking suitably grossed-out, explains that of course she meant join her and her friends down by the lake; embarrassment all round, and a quick dirty laugh for the audience. Here, on the other hand, the babysitter really does have a crush on the man but doesn’t dare say anything, the two of them sitting in uncomfortable silence – till, right at the end, she offers a shy-yet-fervent expression of support which sounds, in that context, like a full-on confession of love. It’s poignant and very well-judged, but not exactly playing for belly laughs.
Then again, there’s more at stake here – because the man, Cal (Steve Carell), has just seen his marriage collapse, his wife Emily (Julianne Moore) having struck him with a double thunderbolt: she’s slept with someone else, and she wants a divorce. They’re sitting in the car, coming home from dinner, and she tells him everything; “Please stop talking,” says Cal in a small voice – then, when she won’t, opens the door of the moving car and jumps, hitting the ground like a sack of potatoes. Later he moves out, takes a small apartment and starts hanging out at a nearby cocktail bar – where his constant high-volume self-pity attracts the attention of Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a wildly successful ladies’ man who decides to show Cal the ropes. How many women have you slept with?, asks Jacob. One, replies Cal hopelessly. “Not at one time!” cries Jacob, unable to believe what he’s hearing.
The film sets up two worlds: the world of the bar, filled with Jacob’s masculine bravado (“The war between the sexes is over, and we won!”), and the world outside, where Cal pines for Emily and his 13-year-old son Robbie pines for the aforementioned babysitter – leading to an awkward love triangle since she, you’ll recall, has a thing for Cal. The excellent script lets the two worlds develop side-by-side (also in the mix is Emma Stone, as a young lawyer briefly courted by Jacob), then collides them violently and hilariously.
Crazy, Stupid, Love doesn’t do anything radically different to many (or most) rom-coms, it just works a little harder. The punchline is plotted, not just thrown into the mix (consider, for instance – if you’ve seen the film – what a clever touch “Nana” is); the set-ups are human, the jokes laced with pain. Cal’s colleagues overhear him crying in the men’s room, and assume he has cancer (the whole office cheers when they find out it’s ‘only’ a divorce). Robbie listens to his mum crying in bed, and Googles “Mum crying in bed”. It’s true that it ends in public, with a crowd of strangers spontaneously applauding our hero’s earnest speech, and we even get the cliché of significant details (an envelope, a face-slap) being brought back at the end for a little buzz of emotional closure, but it’s not offensive – mostly, I suspect, because it isn’t glib. The characters are solid, so we’re happy to applaud an earnest speech semi-resolving their problems. The story works, so the little details at the end are just gravy.
The actors work too, Oscar-nominated actors giving real performances. Gosling’s toned body is almost cartoonish (“It’s like you’re Photoshopped!”), but at one point Jacob talks about his parents – Dad was soft, Mum was vain, smart and cold – and you realise how neatly those Oedipal undercurrents fit what he’s doing. I’m less sure about Julianne Moore, who’s too much the sensitive bloom to convince alongside down-to-earth Carell (he seemed to fit better with Tina Fey in Date Night), but it’s still good casting because she’s a redhead, and so is Emma Stone. I can say no more.
I like everything about this film. Even the commas in the title are a nice touch, suggesting a kind of wry shrug (it’s crazy, it’s stupid, [but] it’s love). I suppose my enthusiasm could just be a reaction to the current state of rom-coms in general – their gross jokes, their self-indulgence, their high sugar content and empty crowd-pleasing – but it’s hard to juggle plot strands like this and make it work. Love, Actually did something similar and turned out hateful (in my opinion) because everything seemed fake and manufactured. Crazy, Stupid, Love is more heartfelt, more soulful, more organic (it’s also much funnier, though of course humour is subjective). “Be better than The Gap,” Jacob advises Cal in a neat bit of reverse product-placement, urging him to spiff up his wardrobe, and maybe that’s the point about this movie. It’s not perfect (what is?) but it’s better than The Gap. And then some.
DIRECTED BY Glenn Ficarra and John Requa
STARRING Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore
US 2011 118 mins.
