Crazy, Stupid, Love. is, for the most part, an effective love story, but the two figures in thrall to one another aren't the ones you think: The magnetism between the movie's two male stars, Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling, is what really makes the movie tick. The women -- and we're talking about women like Julianne Moore, Emma Stone, Marisa Tomei and coltish relative newcomer Annaleigh Tipton -- almost function as accessories, although, as wonderful as these actresses are, that still isn't necessarily a liability. Everyone in Crazy, Stupid, Love. is served well by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's crisp, intelligent direction. Their instincts keep the story moving deftly; if only, right at the finish line, the movie didn't suffer from a giant failure of nerve.
Crazy, Stupid, Love. opens with a cozy montage of various anonymous couples playing footsie under the table. But when the camera cuts to the last set of feet, we can see that they're sad, dejected feet; feet whose owners haven't had sex (or at least good sex) in ages; feet that are about to throw in the towel. And that's exactly what Mrs. Feet -- or Emily, played by Moore -- has in mind. After she and husband Cal (Carell) leave the restaurant where they're having dinner, she announces flatly that after approximately a quarter-century together, she wants a divorce. She's had a fling with a co-worker and, she reasons -- somewhat unreasonably -- "I think the fact that I did it just shows how broken we are."
Cal is blindsided, stunned into a state of numbness. In the discussion that ensues as the two drive home, he loses his composure and jumps out of the car. Later, when they arrive home to greet their adolescent son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) and his babysitter, Jessica (the appealing, mildly gawky Tipton), Robbie receives the news with measured indifference; mostly, he's just impressed that his father jumped out of a car.
Jessica, it turns out, has a huge crush on Cal, and that's only the beginning of the crazy, stupid romantic tribulations that unfold in Crazy, Stupid, Love. Cal begins hanging out in a slick bar, telling anyone who will listen (which is just about nobody) that he's a "cuckold" -- he gets a sad, sorry kick just out of using the word. One of the regular denizens of that bar is Gosling's Jacob, a ladykiller who favors suits that fit him so superbly you can barely spot an elbow wrinkle. He'd feel naked without a silk pocket square.
Jacob takes Cal under his wing for a makeover: "Are you Steve Jobs?" he quips, eyeing the beat-up New Balance sneakers Cal wears for every occasion. Noting Cal's saggy jeans, he announces, "You have a mom butt. Is that what you want?" Even sartorially clueless Cal has to concede that it isn't, and the two set off on a shopping spree for the man stuff that will change Cal's life.
Where are the women through all this? Moore's Emily is tentatively eyeing that co-worker (played by Kevin Bacon) as a romantic prospect, though deep down she knows he's all wrong. Jessica is grappling with her own Cal crush, which is further complicated by the fact that Robbie -- a smart, sensible kid with the ability to use swear words intelligently -- has a massive crush on her. Stone's Hannah hovers on the periphery: She's one of the patrons of the same bar Cal and Jacob frequent, and early in the movie, she's the target of Jacob's laser-beam seduction technique, though she doesn't succumb to it. Mostly, she's just trying to finish up law school and wondering if a guy she appears to be seeing casually (played by the rather ewky Josh Groban) is going to propose.
Why on Earth Hannah would even consider marrying a smug, clueless guy like the one Groban plays is something the movie never bothers to ask. And though much of the writing in Crazy, Stupid, Love. is crisp and quick-witted -- the script is by Dan Fogelman -- it too often sells its characters short. Ficarra and Requa -- who previously directed the sometimes charming, sometimes wobbly I Love You Phillip Morris -- keep nearly every scene moving at a clip. There are no slack patches of sludgy dialogue between the characters, and toward the end, there's a marvelous, '30s comedy-style farcical wind-up that Ficarra and Requa handle with astonishing grace.
Except it's not quite a windup. Instead of settling the whole mess of the movie's numerous interlocking intrigues and affairs right there, Ficarra and Requa add a needless section to the movie, which includes a long, sappy speech that actually uses -- more than once -- the most loathsome word in the universe of romance, "soulmate."
I'm hardly against finding one great person you truly click with. But the idea of two disparate souls floating around in the universe, each hopelessly incomplete until it melds, into a single paramecium-style organism, with the other soul that has been foreordained for it, depresses me no end, and I don't think I'm alone.
The biggest drag about Crazy, Stupid, Love. is that it ends with a bloated public declaration about how love is a leap of faith that doesn't always pay off -- and then it does what it can to reassure us that, in the case of Emily and Cal, it will pay off. The movie at least pretends to be open to the messiness of love 90 percent of the time; the other 10 percent, it insists that there must be some sort of logical order to it, especially if one of those dread soulmates is involved. Maybe it's just that Ficarra and Requa don't want to send their audience home depressed, although frankly, I find acknowledgment of love's imperfection a lot more cheery than desperate insistence that true love really does conquer all. The movie also subscribes to the idea, without ever spelling it out (it doesn't have to), that sex without commitment is "bad," while sex with your soulmate, even if it's boring, is the only key to true happiness. How's that for setting up unrealistic expectations?
If you can get past all the glassy-eyed romantic cheerleading, there are a few pleasures to be found within Crazy, Stupid, Love. For one, there's Stone's broad, marvelously geeky smile, and the way she at first deflects Gosling's heavy-duty flirtations like a Power Puff Girl crossed with Wonder Woman. As for Carell, he can be exhausting to watch when he's allowed to hog every scene. He's better when there are surefooted actors all around him, to siphon some of the faux-self-effacement off him. Marisa Tomei, in a small role as one of his romantic conquests, fits the bill beautifully.
But it's really Gosling who keeps Carell on his New Balance-shod toes. He's quickly becoming the actor who can do just about anything, and here his knack for comedy is fanned out regally, like a peacock's tail. When, early in their acquaintanceship, Jacob asks Cal how many women he's been with, the straightforward response is "One." Gosling waits a beat -- giving us more time to finger the exquisite silkiness of his line delivery -- before interjecting, "No, not at one time." Cal blinks back at him, perpetually locked in his one-woman, one-man innocence. Yet in that moment it's Jacob -- too smooth, too disreputable, too unsure of himself to really commit -- who seems so much more alive. As Gosling plays him, he's the guy you can't trust for a minute. He's nobody's soulmate, but that doesn't mean he can never be somebody's baby.