Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (2011)
That full stop is attention-seeking. The title irritated me too because I couldn’t think, as I watched the film, of the similar one it nearly brought to mind. (This turned out to be the 2004 ITV tele-film Dirty Filthy Love.) The collision of different registers may be meant to reflect the polymorphism hinted at in the film’s name but for much of the time I suspected it was more because the central comic premise – an expert womaniser tries to help a middle-aged nerd, whose wife of twenty-five years is divorcing him, to ‘rediscover his manhood’ – was too thin to sustain a full-length feature. But the lurches in tone and style happen so repeatedly that they come to seem intentional; and when, as the closing credits came up, I was reminded who the directors were, I was inclined to think there’d been method in the apparent messiness. I don’t know when Crazy, Stupid, Love (I’m not going to repeat the full stop throughout) was made in relation to the distribution problems that beset I Love You Phillip Morris, the previous (debut) feature of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. I don’t know either how truly subversive either that film or parts of this new one really are but it’s a fact that Phillip Morris – with its aggressively gay conman protagonist and even with Jim Carrey in that role and Ewan McGregor as Phillip – didn’t get a full theatrical release in the US. Here Ficarra and Requa have Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Emma Stone and Marisa Tomei in the cast but they also have some risky sexual elements. Apart from Jacob (Gosling), who tutors Cal (Carell) in the art of woman objectification, there’s Cal’s thirteen-year-old son Robbie (Jonah Bobo), who’s is in love with his seventeen-year-old babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton). (In their first scene she goes into his bedroom and finds him wanking.) Jessica is increasingly obsessed with Cal, whose wife Emily (Moore) has recently decided to end their marriage: a more sexually precocious girl at school advises Jessica, if she wants Cal to notice her, to be ‘dirty’ so Jessica takes nude photos of herself on her mobile. It’s as if Ficarra and Requa want to avoid as much as they can the commercial problems of Phillip Morris – so they limn the potentially controversial threads of Dan Fogelman’s screenplay within the framework – and often with the emotional flavour – of a more familiarly eccentric, touching heartwarmer. They give the audience plenty to laugh at. But they left me with a sense they might be laughing at the audience too.
I found myself responding to the less conventional elements in different ways. I liked just about everything in the Cal-Jacob department but wasn’t comfortable with Robbie’s or Jessica’s passions. These are often illustrated in farcical situations but they persist and that persistence both is strong and made me queasy (effects that are reinforced by the two young actors: neither is comfortable to watch – though both are really into their characters). These mixed feelings are strongest in their final scene: Robbie tells Jessica he’s optimistic she’ll love him eventually because, as he grows older, he’ll look more like his dad; she gives him the nude photos she took for Cal to ‘get you through high school’. By contrast, Cal’s unsentimental education by Jacob is sheer enjoyment – and that’s also because of the actors, and because Carell and Gosling, unlike the kids, are able to fuse rich characterisation with an amused awareness. There are sequences in this film that are really bad and make no sense at any level. The first woman Cal goes to bed with after Jacob has helped him on his way is Kate (Tomei), who turns out to be a teacher at Robbie’s school. It’s when Emily and Cal are briefly reunited for a parents evening (and rapprochement is in the air) that Cal and Kate also meet again. Her love rat tirade in front of a crowd of parents is so crudely ridiculous that you cringe for Marisa Tomei – something that rarely happens. The film-makers seem to have forgotten about this outburst when Kate appears in the end-of-school-year sequences later on. The scene that propels Hannah (Stone), in a fit of pique, into Jacob’s arms, after she had the nerve to resist him earlier in the story, is terrible too. Hannah has just qualified as a lawyer and we’re meant to believe she’s expecting a proposal of marriage rather than the offer of a job from a male lawyer (Josh Groban) who is so rebarbative you wonder how Hannah could bear to work with him, let alone become his wife.
But Crazy, Stupid, Love also includes several excellent moments and one extended sequence which is brilliant. In the very first scene, Cal and Emily are in a restaurant. Steve Carell’s opening line is, ‘Oh, I’m so full – you were right, I shouldn’t have had all that bread’. He invests it with a blend of wit and dullness that makes you both laugh and see immediately why Emily is about to tell Cal she wants a divorce. The directors, the scenarist and the actors achieve something remarkable when Jacob embarks on what he assumes will be a one-night stand with Hannah, and the encounter turns into something less transient. Jacob explains to Hannah that what’s unfailingly irresistible about him is that he can do the lift like the one at the end of Dirty Dancing, after which any girl will want to go to bed with him. Because Jacob has seemed so scrupulously cool until now, the secret of his success is strikingly cheesy. It works with Hannah as with everyone before her then, when they’re in bed, she asks Jacob questions about his parents and we see him as vulnerable for the first time. There’s no breakdown or any explosion of resentment – that lack of melodrama gives the exposure of Jacob’s feelings more impact. These scenes are edited in a way that convinces you that hours have passed in the bedroom and a lot of emotional ground has been covered. Jacob’s transition from love machine to lover is comic but believable.
Steve Carell’s combination of gifts runs the risk of his getting cast in films much worse than this one to perform comic routines and touch our hearts – to give an illusion of depth and substance. The great thing about Carell, though, is that what he does on screen always seems to be anchored in comedy: the more serious bits are an aspect of the comedy rather than a departure from it. The physical and temperamental contrasts between him and Ryan Gosling make them a fine partnership here. When Jacob takes his shirt off, Hannah exclaims that: ‘You look like you’ve been Photoshopped!’ and Gosling is almost alarmingly muscular. He looks about a foot taller and much leaner since Half Nelson, let alone Lars and the Real Girl. He gives the role a surprising delicacy which is always funny: he’s almost ridiculously elegant in Jacob’s pick-up routines and his line readings are very witty. The leading men are better than the women: it’s always good to see Marisa Tomei but she’s badly used and Julianne Moore is thoroughly uncertain as Emily, although I got to like Emma Stone. With Kevin Bacon as the work colleague Emily’s having an affair with, and Julianna Guill as Hannah’s best friend (who disappears without explanation).
28 September 2011
