Last year’s Blue Valentine followed one couple on an endlessly dark journey from the first sparks of romantic love to the eventual crushing implosion of the relationship after years of acrimony. Like Crazy looks, on the surface, to be a lighter approach to similar material, the stubborn refusal of the attachment between two people to disappear, regardless of how many barriers the couple has to deal with. For the most part that’s the case, but don’t let that fool you into thinking this is the hope-filled antidote to Valentine‘s pessimistic darkness: it’s just that here it’s circumstance that’s at work to drive wedges between people, rather than mounting resentment, and the ways in which those circumstances can derail even the most devoted couples.
Like Crazy starts with a charming meeting between two Los Angeles college students, Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones). After class one day, she leaves a note on his windshield that is adorably over-eager, yet also defuses any apprehension about its ardor with just the right measure of self-deprecating humor. Anna is on exchange from the U.K., and after some warm and fuzzy scenes of their initial romance, they’re forced to deal with her eventual return home after they’re done with school.
Director and co-writer Drake Doremus does an excellent job at creating the casual, offhand feel of real interactions, while still managing to convey the heightened emotions of young love. So when the couple makes the ill-advised decision of allowing her to overstay her student visa because they can’t bear to be away from one another, it seems like an entirely plausible and even blissful development, even as the feeling of impending doom creeps over you.
As feared, Anna is unable to re-enter the country after a quick trip home for a wedding, setting up years of immigration difficulties and the constant ebb and flow of the couple’s affections as they try and fail to move on with their lives, dating other people even as they continue to harbor feelings for one another. Before this happened, Anna offhandedly declares, “We’ll sort something out,” when presented with logistical questions that the couple isn’t sure how to answer. But that’s not a plan, and without a plan, life has a way of sorting things out for us.
The deck that Doremus stacks up against this beleagured pair is as rigged as they come, and if the film has a weakness, it’s how readily he telegraphs each difficulty that’s right around the corner. But his aim seems to be to heighten the frustration of the viewer as two trains barrel toward one another unaware of the danger; in that, he’s successful.
More importantly, even if the situations feel overly constructed, the character approach feels utterly natural, and the two balance one another out. The director films some scenes from a voyeuristic distance, others from a nearly uncomfortable intimacy. But no matter where he observes from, he lets Yelchin and Jones play out their scenes with a remarkable amount of naturalism. It’s sort of a Cassavetes-lite approach that is never as searingly uncomfortable as that director’s films, but that still allows anyone who has found themselves in the difficult romantic circumstances onscreen to immediately find themselves thrust back into their own memories. Those difficultues are are many and varied enough that nearly everyone who’s ever had any heartbreak in their life should find something to latch onto.
This is romance that isn’t meant to reassure, but rather to reflect how difficult it is for people to remain together, even when they share a passion and depth of feeling that is impossible to deny. Maintaining that romance can be hard work under the best of circumstances, and a herculean effort when those circumstances conspire against you. Doremus conspires against them in ways that are hardly fair, but then again, when does life give us the benefit of the doubt? And even as tough as they have it, he keeps hope alive in the audience just as he does in Anna and Jacob for the happy ending the movies always promise.
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Like Crazy
Directed by Drake Doremus
Written by Drake Doremus and Ben York Jones
Starring Anton Yelchin, Felicity Jones, Jennifer Lawrence, Charlie Bewley
Running time: 90 minutes
Rated PG-13 for sexual content and brief strong language.
Opens today at E Street and Betheda Row.
