Crazy, Stupid Love
Two stars (out of 4)
Rated: PG
Here’s the nutty thing about Crazy, Stupid Love.
How could a comedy so alert to details, such as the Velcro rasp of a nerd’s cheap wallet or a rake’s surprising affection for Dirty Dancing, be so tone deaf about the bigger picture?
This movie has so much going for it. Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling co-star as the clueless nerd and his hipster mentor. It’s yet another riff on Pygmalion, not to mention Carell’s earlier 40 Year Old Virgin, but they make an agreeable pair. Their accomplices include Julianne Moore, Emma Stone, Marisa Tomei and Kevin Bacon, estimable actors all.
Yet it’s almost all for naught, apart from brief moments that suggest the superior comedy this could have been. The movie squanders its potential with a sloppy script chock full of false notes. Even the bumptious score intrudes, often bumping into important dialogue.
If you didn’t know in advance that Crazy, Stupid Love has two directors, you might guess it. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa share the helming, as they did for the much sharper I Love You, Phillip Morris, but they’re at sixes and sevens over what kind of movie they’re making. So is screenwriter Dan Fogelman, whose previous credits run mainly to cartoons (Cars 2, Tangled).
Crazy, Stupid Love begins on a serious note, with Moore’s brittle Emily casually announcing to her accountant husband Cal (Carell) that she wants a divorce, after 25 years of marriage and children.
We don’t know why she wants out, and we aren’t given reason to care, but it emerges that Emily has been cuckolding Cal with her co-worker David Lindhagen (Bacon, badly used).
The tone quickly turns farcical. Cal picks himself up and heads down to the local bar, the same one that we will see endlessly throughout the picture. (Was the budget that low?)
There he meets Jacob (Gosling), a man of affluence but no apparent job, whose sole life skill is the speed bedding of every woman he fancies in this same bar. No mean feat this, since you’d think the ladies would have copped to his antics by now. The one woman who doesn’t immediately swoon to Jacob’s Playboy Advisor pickup lines is budding lawyer Hannah (Stone), more on whom later.
For reasons only seen in movies, Jacob decides he’s going to help Cal “reclaim his manhood” by teaching him how to attract women. Cal’s first conquest is a schoolteacher played by Tomei, who comes off as shrill and unconvincing, a waste of her comic abilities.
Cal’s manhood reclamation project includes a shopping expedition led by Jacob, wherein we learn that The Gap is no longer cool (and not a product-placement candidate, one assumes).
Had Crazy, Stupid Love stuck to this story, it might have succeeded, although it is getting awfully wearisome to see Carell (who has a producer’s credit here) yet again playing the cheery doofus.
Instead, the film sails into well-charted waters, uncertain of which direction to take. Jacob discovers that another part of his anatomy works besides the one between his legs. Hannah decides there’s more to life than approaching the bench.
Cal and Emily talk about soul mates, and whether such a concept really exists. Meanwhile, in the most cringeworthy of all these multiple plot turns, their 13-year-old son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) openly lusts for his 17-year-old babysitter, Jessica (Analeigh Tipton), while Jessica secretly pines for an unsuspecting Cal.
Only occasionally do we get glimpses of the movie this could have been, and they usually involve Gosling, who manages to make Jacob seem more charming than sleazy.
Rarely does the dialogue exceed sitcom banality, but here’s one exchange that promises more:
Emily: “I don’t know when you and I stopped being ‘us,’ do you?”
Cal: “Maybe it was when you started screwing David Lindhagen.”
Too bad Crazy, Stupid Love is too crazed and stupid to make the most of such emotional honesty.
Peter Howell is a syndicated Toronto Star movie critic.