Like Crazy is not
quite the worst movie of the year, but it has a good chance of being one of the
least interesting. It’s a romance that attempts to bring a more realistic edge
to its story, showing the difficulties in the central relationship that cause the
couple to strain and to stray, all the while cooing at each other and declaring
their soul mate status. Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones play the college kids
who fall head over heels over the course of a montage. It, the movie, has barely
started and they’re already eating ice cream cones and driving around the
go-kart track together. Is there anything less interesting than watching,
devoid of context, two people snuggle and whisper and say that they’re in love?
These two say it, but I don’t believe it. I believe they like spending time
together and they’re attracted to each other. But love? I’m not buying it.
They’re a couple with no obvious chemistry and have almost
nothing of interest to say. When I read that the many scenes in the film were
largely improvised I wasn’t surprised. That means the blame for the
unimpressive dialogue, mumbled and repetitive, should fall on the cast for
being bad improvisers as well as the writer-director Drake Doremus and his
co-writer Ben York Jones for creating such unconvincing scenarios. There’s such
a vague, wobbly feeling to it all as these two characters are living lives that
are hastily sketched.
It’s a feeling brought about by the annoying, carefully
careless hand-held camerawork as well as the facts of the story. Yelchin wants
to make furniture. Jones is on a student visa and has to return to England
soon. That’s the extent of what we know when they start staring longingly at
one another and saying that they’re in love. I guess we’ll just have to take
their word for it. They think they’re in love simply because they whispered to
each other, swapped life stories, had a little bit of fun, and can’t stand to
be apart. Not that they’d had any real experience apart before they reached
that conclusion.
The real conflict of the picture comes out of their bad
decisions. She doesn’t want to part with her college sweetheart so she decides
to stay for a few months past her visa’s expiration. She either naively
believes that True Love will erase the very real rules of immigration or she’s
really stupid. By overstaying her visa, all because she literally tells her
boyfriend that she “doesn’t want to be sad,” she is unable to reenter the
country after she goes back to her homeland for a week’s stay for her friend’s
wedding.
This leads to a tearful scene when she’s denied reentry to
the United States and is told she’s being put on the next plane back. It’s
played as tragic, but this could hardly be less so. If she had left when her
visa expired, there would be no problem if she wanted to come back as a
tourist. Instead, she just made things harder on herself. Those couple of
months – yes, two whole months! – of separation she skipped are replaced with
endless red tape and a much longer separation. This isn’t a story about runaway
bureaucracy catching up innocent lovers in inscrutable, unfortunate rules. This
is a story about a couple that know the rules, break them anyways, and then are
surprised they can’t be together.
But, of course, they can be together. Yelchin could move to
England. He just seems like he doesn’t want to. Besides, he’s started his
furniture business and his secretary is the very pretty Jennifer Lawrence (she deserves
much better than this). So, he’s not going. He’ll visit a few times, but he
won’t make the move. Jones’s lawyer goes to work on her visa and she goes to
work at a magazine. Their lives move on. They should just acknowledge a good
time, a learning experience, and get on with better things. But the movie, for
some strange reason, keeps trying to push them together. This is a futile film
romance with all subplot and detail stripped away. It’s not really interested
in their careers or affairs. It’s not even interested in their families, even
though Jones’s sweet, loving parents (Oliver Muirhead and Alex Kingston) are
the only interesting, well-acted characters in the entire movie. No, the whole the
film is focused on why these two characters need
to be together despite, or more likely because of, their total stupidity.
Jones turns in what has to be the whiniest performance of
the year, Yelchin, one of the least energetic. It is so very hard to care about
them. I didn’t buy it as a romance. I didn’t even buy it as a movie romance.
The whole thing’s cruising towards an unhappy ending and, when it gets there,
it rings just as false as the opening mush. It’s a movie that improbably pushes
its leads together at every turn, only to end up saying sometimes love can go
wrong. Of course it can, but the film’s structure of coincidences and
celebration of soul mate status sure did a good job of convincing these
characters otherwise. I nearly strained my eyes with all the rolling they were
doing. It’s the kind of movie that, after a while, I merely sat through,
seething with impatience, desperately awaiting the end credits.
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