Is it a comedy? A romance? A drama? I’d call Crazy, Stupid, Love a mixture of all three, which isn’t a bad thing, but the confused nature of the narrative shows directors John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (I Love You Phillip Morris) were just as indecisive as the title.
As a comedy there is a lot to laugh about. As a drama there are some solid performances. As a romance… eh, it’s not really all that romantic, though the Dirty Dancing moment is pretty great. And, as a movie, it’s a blurred mixture of one thing, then another, that ultimately stumbles in the third act en route to running about 20 minutes too long.
I Crazy, Stupid, Love, Steve Carell plays Cal Weaver, a man that doesn’t realize he’s become a bit of a bore. His marriage has become stagnant and as a result his wife (Julianne Moore) has cheated on him with one of her co-workers and is asking for a divorce. Accepting without putting up any kind of a fight, we quickly find Cal on the rebound and drowning his sorrows at a local bar where he runs into perennial ladies man, Jacob Palmer (Ryan Gosling).
One drunken night, Cal is expounding on the death of his relationship and how he’s a “cuckold” who’s been “cuckolded.” This is when Jacob finally decides to help the poor fella out, if not to set him on the right track, to ensure the rest of the bar is no longer suffering from Cal’s verbal anguish. Cue a makeover montage, a new Cal and a new trajectory. Curiously, by the time Cal has reinvented himself I felt as if we were well on our way to getting through this plot, but we hadn’t even scratched the surface.
Elsewhere, Cal’s 13-year-old son is infatuated with his 17-year-old babysitter, Jacob is considering hanging up his player status as he believes he may have found true love and Cal’s wife can’t figure out what she wants. All of this is on the peripheral, but is often brought to the center as a means to throw a wrench in the narrative or offer a punch line. I get it, that’s the nature of storytelling, but Requa and Ficarra need to learn when enough is enough. They needed to focus harder on the core narrative, which was the story of Cal and how he took the relationship he had with his wife for granted (still not an excuse for cheating on him) and how things got so screwed up. Yes, Jacob’s story is also a large part of this, but it is still there to serve Cal’s central story and it seems that was frequently forgotten in favor of punch lines or needless side stories.
Frequent Disney screenwriter Dan Fogelman (Cars, Tangled) has delivered a kitchen sink screenplay, tossing in every bit of drama and comedy he can think of and it moves at a fast pace to begin with, but then derails as if he didn’t want it to end too quickly. A side drama between Cal and a middle school teacher (Marisa Tomei) is one of the film’s biggest missteps, but Fogelman makes up for it with a backyard domestic scuffle that really should have been where the film ends. By the time that scene is over the end is an inevitability, so when the film continues for another 20 minutes, it slowly and surely becomes an exercise in tedium.
The film hits an absolute wall during an eighth grade graduation ceremony where it loses all sense of reality and decides to spell out the overall theme with grade school eloquence and follows that up with a weird gifting of underage pornography. At this point, the first 90 minutes hardly even matter.
The performances, however, were good. Carell turns in a solid and mature performance. He can’t help that Requa and Ficarra have him hiding out in his ex-wife’s backyard on more than one occasion, or that certain scenes should have been deleted. Gosling also works well, bringing a certain level of charm and personality to what is essentially the GQ version of Matt Leblanc’s Joey character from “Friends”.
If you’re wondering about Emma Stone, Julianne Moore or Kevin Bacon, yeah, they’re in there too and they carry their own weight, but their roles are limited. Like I said, it’s all about Cal and when it’s good, Crazy, Stupid, Love is actually quite enjoyable, but once it overstays its welcome you can forget about it.
