I Crazy, Stupid, Love this movie.

This review has been my Everest. Criticising something is easy (see: most of my output). Liking something is effortless. Attempting to explain why I fell just a little bit in love with this movie has been like constantly trying to glimpse something out of the corner of my eye - frustratingly elusive. 

So eventually I quit trying and played to my strengths instead.

Some people may not buy Ryan Gosling as a super buff lady’s man as he struts through the movie looking like a sexually ambiguous GQ model and exuding a strangely attractive misogynistic charm. In fact Gosling, who has been quietly turning in stellar performances for years, picks the most unlikely genre of all to turn in a magnetic performance that’s so good it’s a borderline satire of the standard rom com hero. 

At the other end of the scale, others may be disappointed to see Steve Carrell toning down his more familiar goofiness in order to play it straight as the middle aged cuckold who gets his mojo back under the metrosexual wing of Gosling’s barfly. The fact that their unlikely bromance is front and centre in a movie that purports to be a rom com is but the smallest surprise in a film that sometimes feels twistier and turnier than an M. Night Shyamalan movie featuring ghostly alien superheroes. More astonishing is the way in which their mismatched pairing is as lovingly tended to as the more conventional relationships throughout the rest of the film, inadvertently puncturing the fratboy antics that have become synonymous with any kind of significant platonic male relationship.

True, CSL’s attempt to ponder the nature of virtually every type of relationship (marriage, parent-child, affair, platonic, new love, puppy love, obsession, one night stand. And those are just the ones I noticed), might leave some of those relationships with less screen time to develop. Similarly, with hindsight, the female characters may feel slightly sidelined, but perhaps that’s just because (in a neat reversal for the genre) they’re marginally less unbalanced than their male counterparts. Emma Stone and Marisa Tomei are impeccably comic, but it’s Julianne Moore who performs some sort of thespian voodoo, somehow earning the audience’s sympathy over the course of the movie, despite being responsible for the initial act of adultery that kicks off the subsequent chain of events.

Just as well then that the pitch perfect cast (and yes, I include ANTM alumus Analeigh Tipton as the doe-eyed teenage babysitter and crooner Josh Groban as the world’s dullest boyfriend), manage to convey everything they need to in the time allotted, from the heartbreak of unrequited love, to the fury of a woman scorned. It even manages to throw in a couple of unlikely but perfectly pitched curve balls - and it’s been a while since any film, let alone a romantic comedy, genuinely blind sided me.

For years, Hollywood has been the main (albeit not the sole) peddler of the same cheap knock offs. My own pet theory posits that only two or three genuinely great romcoms will be produced in any given decade, and CSL appears to be evidence that the second decade of the century may have peaked early. Rom coms are at their best when they reflect real life, albeit with a few extra spoonfuls of sugar. When Harry Met Sally and While You Were Sleeping are more obvious examples, but even Sleeping in Seattle and Notting Hill, for all their fanciful plot devices, still had streaks of something resembling the sweetly bitter reality of relationships running through them. Apart from these solitary peaks, cinema has little to offer the discerning hopeless romantic, apart from watered down vehicles designed to do nothing more than make the female lead look adorably ditzy and showcase the male lead’s abs. 

Which is precisely why Crazy, Stupid, Love kicks sand in the face of most romantic comedies made in the past twenty years. It starts with divorce and ends with a threat to shoot someone in the face, and yet I would happily describe it as one of the feelgood films of the year. Like a perfect chocolate soufflé, this is both feather light, yet rich and satisfying. There will undoubtedly be those who feel that CSL deviates too far from the candy coated cookie cutter rom coms that have dominated for so long, leaving a succession of Hollywood starlets and comedic actresses who should know better with little to do and even less of note to say. But CSL dares to revel in the bittersweet twilight between reality and make believe - there are no guaranteed happy endings, but more than enough hope to leave the audience wanting more. 

Some people may not be comfortable walking out of a cinema with an unbearable lightness of being that they just can’t explain. But just this once, I wasn’t one of them. This may not be a perfectly made film, but it is a perfect movie, and one of the finest rom coms since When Harry Met Sally.

I crazy, stupid, love. This film.