Film Review | Crazy, Stupid, Love

Barring the initial pain suffered by our protagonist Cal Weaver (Steve Carrell) after his wife Emily (Julianne Moore) dumps him (while confessing she slept with a co-worker), what follows is charming, heart-warming and life-affirming… and that’s not even getting into Cal’s crash course in effortlessly picking up women in bars, delivered with a panache by his newfound friend Jacob (Ryan Gosling).

Indeed, Cal’s plight – if we can even call it that – is a perfect illustration of how there’s hope for love – not to mention fun – even after divorce.

And were the film to carry on in that gear (call it the ‘I’m divorced so screw it I’ll just screw’ gear), it might just have been enough for a passable if mediocre rom-com. But it does that little bit extra.

Carrell dangerously veers towards being typecast as the put-upon beta male, following his roles in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Dinner for Schmucks and Little Miss Sunshine, but as Jacob tells the depressed, freshly divorced Cal as he necks one cocktail after another: “you got a kind face.”

It’s that ‘kind face’ that makes the film work. Because as much of a loser as Cal is, you know he means well, so you go along with his mistakes… comical and sad as they may be, they always hit home.

On the other side of the coin is Jacob, who would have been an annoyingly arrogant, intolerably sleazy character in lesser hands. But Gosling – already a veteran of the industry at age 30 – is an Academy Award nominee whose breakout role in tearjerker romantic drama The Notebook should not, by rights, overshadow his sizeable indie-cred, and when Jacob is a charmer you don’t scoff, you buy it… and his own journey in parallel to Cal’s is just as convincing.

If there’s one real flaw in the film, it’s the casting of current rom-com It-Girl Emma Stone. Not that Stone doesn’t deliver a perfectly capable, perfectly charming performance as the young lawyer who puts her nose up at Jacob’s attempts to seduce her. That’s all well and good, but she isn’t on screen for nearly long enough, and one gets the feeling that the producers brought her in to act as a ‘magic ingredient’ that would win over the less sentimental demographic.

But no matter, because any romantic comedy – and this has been true of the genre’s early days: from Shakespeare to Jane Austen and beyond – relies on a good script and wonder of wonders, we have one right here!

When it’s not shuffling stereotypes around a well-trodden story blueprint, Dan Fogleman’s screenplay offers up some great lines. Jacob and Cal’s tough love-laced tuition in playboyhood is comedy gold throughout, and a subplot involving Cal’s son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) and his unrequited love for his babysitter, Jessica (Analeigh Tipton) offers up some welcome surprises.

Love is not disposable – something that both the pro- as well as anti- divorce movements went through great pains to stress, in different tones and contexts, over the torturous months leading up to the referendum.

Hollywood seems to believe that it is though, judging by the regular piles of cynical rom-coms that somehow worm their way into the multiplexes each season.

But if at least a couple of them retained the same spirit of Crazy, Stupid, Love, I think we’d all be a little happier.