Looking for a sure-fire way to get thrown into jail? Act like the lead in pretty much any Hollywood rom-com. Not for these romantic heroes the distractions of anti-stalking laws and the idea that no means no: being in love is a free pass to do whatever you like so long as it ends with the object of your affection eventually submitting to your will. All together now: awwww, how romantic.
What makes Crazy Stupid Love a particularly note-worthy example of this somewhat creepy mindset isn’t the fact that three of its’ four romantic subplots revolve around characters constantly shouting “I love you” (okay, not literally), but that all three characters show next to no desire to find out what the object of their desire actually thinks of them. At least with Cal (Steve Carell) it makes sense at first, considering the film opens with his wife Emily (Julianne Moore) telling him she slept with another man and she wants a divorce. He does what anyone would do when confronted with this news: he falls out of a moving car.
Once home (Emily stops to pick him up; clearly not all the love has died), the still dazed Cal decides to drive their 17-year-old babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton) home. He doesn’t notice that she’s clearly in love with him; what makes this worse is that Cal’s thirteen year-old son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) has already declared his love for her. If any of these people would take no for an answer, we wouldn’t have a movie; because they won’t take no for an answer, most of this movie ends up being about people trying to figure out a way to get someone to love them without actually, you know, listening to a word they have to say. Especially if that word is “no”.
Now single, Cal does what single guys do: he goes and hangs out a bar populated entirely by amazingly hot women. Seriously, despite having no problems letting the badly dressed Cal loiter at the bar, the only women allowed inside this venue are model-hot or better. This works out fine for local make-out artist Jacob (Ryan Gosling), who manages to pull every single woman who comes into the place with his patented line “you want to get out of here?” Of course they do, the place is so full of hot women they’re getting an inferiority complex.
For reasons known only to the scriptwriters Jacob takes pity on Cal, gives him a make-over and attitude adjustment, and soon Cal is scoring with the ladies too. But there’s only one lady he has room for in his heart (as opposed to his bed), and that’s the clearly confused and lost without him Emily. Presumably this make-over is enough to win her back, because he never actually seems to ask why she dumped him in the first place. Perhaps all he needed to do was use deodorant?
Meanwhile, the only woman ever to resist Jacob’s charms, law student Hannah (Emma Stone), has, uh, failed to resist his charms in the long term and made a return visit to the bar looking for a good time. And a good time she gets, mostly thanks to his abs, which are so ridiculous the script itself makes fun of them. Still, this turns out to be pretty much the only relationship in the film that involves two people actually liking each other and wanting to be together, as all the while Robbie is running around school shouting about how Jessica is his soulmate while Jessica is taking nude photos of herself to try and win over Cal. As you do.
This is Little Miss Sunshine Carell rather than Dinner For Schmucks Carell, so while there are laughs here there’s also a lot about the importance of family and having someone to share your life with and so on. Which again, doesn’t really work once you realise three quarters of the cast are acting like sex pests. Still, everything works out in the end – by which I mean, nobody presses charges – and the performances are across-the-board excellent. Well, with the possible exception of Moore, who’s just a little too convincing as a woman who’s lost her way in life, and at times it seems more like Cal might just end up wearing her down rather than really rekindling their romance. But Stone and Gosling are great together; anyone want to put them together in a rom-com spin-off, you’ve sold one ticket right here.
- Three stars
Crazy Stupid Love opens in cinemas on Thursday, September 29.