Steve Carell is hoping to be a movie star after “The Office.” Ryan Gosling is trying to prove he can do more than simply dramatic method acting. Emma Stone wants to be seen as more than a kid. “Crazy, Stupid, Love” tries so hard to be generic and boilerplate, and there’s a sense the cast would simply not allow it.
Carell plays Cal, a middle aged man who has just learned in a wrenchingly forward and economical first scene that his wife Emily (Julianne Moore) wants a divorce after 25 years of marriage, namely because she’s had an affair with another man (Kevin Bacon).
Let me first just say how well these actors handle the routine of their car ride home. Moore doesn’t fire off snark or anger. She remains resolute in her decision but clearly conflicted. This is the mark of a complex character. And Carell seems to realize that. He doesn’t have an outburst of tears or fury. He’s confused because he realizes both he and his wife are something other than what he expected.
As Cal drowns his sorrows, the ladies man Jacob (Gosling) can’t help but feel pity for him. Cal’s lost his manhood along the way, and Emily is missing it, Jacob explains. What Cal needs is a complete remodeling with new clothes, confidence and charm. Earning it gets him more women than he’s had in his life, and he does it not to forget Emily but to find the male maturity he lacked.
But why does Jacob help? It’s because that’s what Jacob does. He doesn’t hit on women; he targets them, essentially getting the women to seduce him. He plays the same game with Cal, not revealing anything to either Cal or his scores about his personality. And it’s not until he meets Hannah (Stone) that he learns he doesn’t even have one.
Here are two relationships, one falling apart and one being born. In each, the roles are reversed. Jacob is looking for an identity of his own, and Hannah is the young lawyer escaping from a lame boyfriend to her womanhood. Conversely, Emily is the nurturing wife now struggling through a mid-life crisis to decide how she could have done so much wrong and been so empty, and Cal is rediscovering what it means to be a man and a romantic.
The weight of these themes are held up in some cute, funny montages with Carell and Gosling, who puts on a remarkably changed comic persona, and then again between Gosling and Stone in one touching night of courtship.
Yet too much weight is granted to Cal’s 13-year-old son with a crush on their 17-year-old babysitter. Their babysitter, by the way, has a strangely perverse attraction to Cal. Neither of these characters, although well performed by their young actors (Jonah Bobo and Analeigh Tipton), know anything of the emotions these complex adults are experiencing, and yet we’re supposed to gain something from them as well.
Put anyone other than Steve Carell in Cal’s role, you lose Carell’s sarcastically detached chemistry and end up with a one-dimensional sad sack. Replace Ryan Gosling with another pretty boy like Ashton Kutcher or Ryan Reynolds, and Jacob loses the ability to find an added dimension and personality when needed. Lose Emma Stone and you lose not just a budding romantic discovering womanhood but a budding movie star.
This is a film salvaged by its actors, tirelessly wrestled from a cloying and simplistic Hollywood screenplay desperately trying to place these characters into a formula driven movie. With the help of directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (“I Love You Phillip Morris”), “Crazy, Stupid, Love’s” performers attain depth and a self-awareness of their own clichés.
Despite it all, the ending is a contrived mess. “Crazy, Stupid, Love” opts for a more “childish” (if that gives you a clue to whom I mean) approach to the title emotion without fully considering the complexity of its characters. The way these multiple star-crossed lovers collide in such a quick, slapdash and cluttered fashion is a real turnoff.
3 stars