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“Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.”
– Sigmund Freud
The people behind Crazy, Stupid, Love have never read the above quote; or, if they have, its meaning didn’t quite sink in. They are the kind of men who would marry their mirrors, if they could, and their entire film is a childish exercise in narcissism.
Alongside No Strings Attached, When in Rome, It’s Complicated, Just Go With It, Leap Year and The Zookeeper, it stands as a tragic testament to the downfall of the Romantic Comedy: a genre once expertly practiced by Frank Capra and Billy Wilder, now sucked dry of all innovation into an intellectual wasteland where any rational individual with ambition or purpose cannot exist.
The people in Crazy, Stupid, Love are searching for their counterparts, which is admirable; but, given their IQ’s, they’d really do better to focus on their own survival. How some of them have made it to middle-age is beyond me. Here's the laundry list of contrivances that comprise their self-serving, inconsequential lives:
Julianne Moore cheats on her nice husband, Steve Carell, seemingly out of boredom, thus breaking up their marriage. He then takes lessons in machismo-insensitivity from cad Ryan Gosling and tricks a nice woman, Marisa Tomei, into sleeping with him, only to promptly abandon her. Meanwhile, Carell's 13-year-old son (a glaringly awkward Jonah Bobo) embarrasses his 17-year-old babysitter with details of how he fantasizes about her while
masturbating, and then proceeds to stalk her relentlessly. And, after getting dumped by her dweeb of a boyfriend (Josh Groban), Emma Stone seduces Ryan Gosling into taking her back to his apartment, talks him into drowsiness, and then they cuddle ... awwwww.
That was when the smell of cinematic bullshit became too pungent, and I left the theatre with what was left of my brain cells. And, as I did, various questions about the movie filtered into my mind:
Do these people have jobs that demand any work from them? I mean, just what do they do all day? How is it that in an economy where a record number of people are on unemployment, these individuals find time to go to a fancy nightclub every night to
plunk down $800 tabs and pick up any one of a number of gorgeous models straight out of the covers of Vogue? How did Steve Carell's son find time to build an entire scaffold - which, according a line of dialogue, it took him four weeks to construct - yet still keep up with his math homework? Why was Emma Stone
attracted to her initial dweeb boyfriend who calls her "Hannah Banana"? Why was she friends with Liza Lapira, who plays a nasty, debilitating, complaining snob who, in all seriousness, may have just set Asian Americans back a few years? And, lastly, exactly how much was Kevin Bacon ripped off by Bernie Madoff to inspire him to accept the thankless role of Julianne Moore's other love interest?
I highly doubt that dual directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, working from a screenplay by Fred Claus auteur Dan Fogelman, took any time to think about the answers to these questions. In the pursuit of figuring out how to have Ryan Gosling remove his shirt in the most exploitative way possible, all those details about plot and/or character development must have somehow gotten in the way. And while Ryan goes topless, Emma Stone - she of the smarmy glare and phony sincerity - never flashes so much as a bra strap in any of her movies, so any chance of her and Gosling's love scene being remotely exciting for the straight gentlemen in the audience was about nil.
Another question emerges: will a shirtless Ryan Gosling be enough to draw the box office business this film hopes to achieve? I think that many giggly young girls and hard-up women will flock to see Mr. Gosling's abdominal muscles, fully aware of the movie's supreme idiocy and turpitude, in the same way that many black people watch Tyler Perry while still aware of his pandering stereotypes.
Look, let's face it, everybody eats McDonald's sometimes when there's nothing else available, even knowing that a Big Mac is just ghastly. Just so, everyone sits through a rom-com or two when there isn't a Nora Ephron movie playing. But this film is where I draw the line. This isn't the cinematic equivalent of junk food; this is just plain junk. There are so many films I'd be willing to re-watch before dumpster diving in the cineplex for a movie scrapped together from the cutting room floor of romantic comedy clichés: "Find your soulmate;" "You're worth fighting for;" "Please, I can explain!;" "So how do you two know each other?..." Who'd have guessed that the most original, witty line in the movie would be Emma Stone's relatively poetic quip to Mr. Gosling, "We're gonna bang."
Oh, but they don't.
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