Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011)

Just last week, Friends With Benefits attempted to breathe life back into the romantic comedy genre by winking to the audience as frequently as possible. It believed that its self-awareness would excuse its complete adherence to every last cliché it so vehemently mocked. This mentality ultimately derailed the film, wasting two engaging performances by Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis in the process. In contrast, the new film Crazy, Stupid, Love approaches its subject in precisely the right way: with absolute sincerity and humor. I have learned my lesson with statements like this in the past, but I believe I mean it this time: Crazy, Stupid, Love is the best romantic comedy I’ve seen since 500 Days of Summer back in 2009. (If you don’t care for that movie, I can’t help you.) Like that film, it isn’t so much a romantic comedy as it is a comedy about love. And a genuine, well-acted, funny one at that.

Essentially the story of the Weaver family, the film follows Cal (Steve Carell) and Emily (Julianne Moore) as their marriage begins to collapse around them. Meanwhile, their son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) is in love with their babysitter (Analeigh Tipton), and—to bring it full circle—their babysitter is in love with Cal. Emily has slept with her co-worker David Lindhagen (Kevin Bacon), and Cal starts going to the bar to try and reenter the dating scene. It is there he meets the womanizing Jacob (Ryan Gosling), who teaches him the ways of seduction. Meanwhile, Jacob pines for the intelligent Hannah (Emma Stone), who at first turns him down. As the film goes on, we follow their attempts to win over the objects of their respective affection.

I shall not say any more, as the film takes some unexpected—yet wonderful—twists in the final act. This is a film with a huge cast of characters, yet it gives all of them their due time and a proper resolution. Almost nothing is contrived, even if some of the emotional moments seem like the obvious course of action. Crazy, Stupid, Love earns every last development for two reasons: 1) the characters are fully-realized, and 2) it is funny. These are the two things that every comedy needs to work, but so rare is the film that achieves this that Crazy, Stupid, Love can’t help but feel like a minor revelation. It is a mainstream Hollywood film to its core, but just as Captain America was an example of the superhero movie done absolutely right, here is the romantic comedy done to a tee.

As this film must fit within the confines of the PG-13 Hollywood film, at times the script feels as if it were scaled down from a slightly harder-edged version. (The word “screw” is used an abnormal amount of times.) Nonetheless, this is hardly a film which can be described as “safe.” It deals with sex and love in a refreshingly frank fashion, particularly when it comes to the film’s younger characters. Sequences that should be icky feel completely at home in the film’s universe. Nothing is ever treated with kiddie gloves, even when the matter at hand deals with the kids themselves.

The film’s entire cast is strong, but the performance that keeps the film together comes courtesy of Ryan Gosling. In many ways, the film is almost entirely about his character. When the movie begins, everyone involved is at a very low point in their love lives. However, Gosling is flying high. He is able to bed just about every girl he meets, and as a result he doesn’t really believe that true love actually exists. People just sleep together, and occasionally for an extended period of time. Eventually he finds the girl that converts him, but because of the struggles of Cal—among other developments—he realizes just how hard love is to maintain. But it exists, and the film believes that. Luckily, it doesn’t become a blind tribute to the undying power of love. Instead, the film is about how love is always a possibility, but you’re going to have to work for it.

Crazy, Stupid, Love was directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who previously wrote Bad Santa and wrote/directed I Love You, Phillip Morris. This film—their first as directors for hire—is one of their more mainstream projects, but so long as it succeeds I suspect they will have a long career to come. Their previous work had a tendency to study just one or two extraordinary characters, but Crazy, Stupid, Love is about several seemingly normal ones. No one here is a Willie Stokes or a Steven Russell; this is a movie that observes a group of people as they deal with their romantic issues. And some of them aren’t pretty.

Whether or not you buy Crazy, Stupid, Love will depend on a single scene later on in the movie, which reveals just how close some of the characters are to each other. To some, this may seem like a manufactured occurrence. To me—and the audience I saw the film with—it seemed like a natural and hilarious revelation. This is a movie that has a whole lot on its plate, but each of the stories within are really about the same thing: love is not something that simply happens and never leaves. It requires effort to discover, and maintenance to keep it alive.

GRADE: A-