Reviewing movies that are outside your comfort zone is usually pretty easy. There are no genre biases in the equation. The only criterias left to form your judgement with are rather objective: quality of screenplay, overall acting game, direction , originality and themes. CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE. is a romantic comedy, a genre that I happen to find useless. Well, thanks to this movie, I now happen to know most romantic comedies are poorly written, clichés, sappy and all shot by same hot dog factory director. How did a single movie taught me all that? CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE. is a good romantic comedy, but it is, first and foremost, a smart movie that understands that rom-coms are a mass consumption item and offers a genuinely different alternative.
Cal and Emily (Steve Carell and Julianne Moore) are a tired middle aged couple flirting with disaster *. Hurt by his wife's rejection, Cal doesn't try to hold it together and moves out right away. Alone at the bar one night, he meets Jacob Palmer (Ryan Gosling), a ladies man with a heart of gold that offers Cal to help him find his lost manhood. In the meantime, Jacob struggles with his own feelings for the one girl that turned him down (Emma Stone), who is herself struggling with turning down Jacob for her boring and insufferable boyfriend (the boring and insufferable Josh Groban). All these people want one thing: a person worth fighting for.
I loved CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE. for its willingness to challenge the clichés of its genre. It is a a dynamic and fearless film. It's one of the first movies I see that openly challenges the concept of monogamy. I've never seen a movie treat so casually the fact that you MAY see other people when you're separated from your husband/wife. Yes, Cal and Emily love each other, but there is this thing, this unstoppable force called LIFE and sometimes it pulls people apart. It was refreshing to watch a movie that ACKNOWLEDGES that while keeping track that a 25 years relationship has value that one night stands do not that. There are beautiful scenes to CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE., where Cal and Emily miss the simple things about one another and these scenes aren't mopey and blubbery, they just are beautiful in their simplicity.
Simple life lessons, really.
Now CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE. isn't the first movie to chose realism over romance, yet what makes it original is that it is very much a romance. The characters are not real people living through real things and neither they are romantic archetypes living romantic things: they are romantic archetypes living through real things. That's what gives CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE. all its flavor. There is a beautiful scene between Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone that illustrates this, where Jacob's ''closing game'' is deconstructed by Stone's character Hannah and he doesn't know how to react. It rocks the balance of power womanizing characters like Jacob are usually all about. It's the kind of details that might've slipped my attention if I was prey to a gritty and violent crime story.
CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE. is an excellent compromise movie. Not only because it will makes every people in the room feel smart for appreciating it (and I'm will every people in the room will, because it's accessible), but also because it delivers the goods while remaining smart. It's still a romantic movie. It's still warm and gushy, yet the situations the characters are put through are at least echoes of the real world. I'll gladly admit I was indulged to something witty and fun by the Hollywood machine. Some success stories are unlikely, yet they're too good to be passed. Be smart. Next time you're having a Netflix argument, pick CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE., look good and make everyone happy.
* Unlike most movies of this ilk. CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE. doesn't waste time establishing artificial pathos with tear-jerking scene. Literally, the fourth line in the movie is: ''I want a divorce''. I thought that was refreshing.
