Like Crazy

 Like Crazy
Paramount Vantage, 2011
Directed by Drake Doremus
Starring: Felicity Jones, Anton Yelchin, Jennifer Lawrence
Four stars

"I thought I understood it, that I could grasp it, but I didn't, not really. Only the smudgeness of it; the pink-slippered, all-containered, semi-precious eagerness of it. I didn't realize it would sometimes be more than whole, that the wholeness was a rather luxurious idea. Because it's the halves that halve you in half. I didn't know, don't know, about the in-between bits. The gory bits of you, and the gory bits of me."

There's a moment in Like Crazy, Drake Doremus's 2011 romantic drama film, where Anna, played by Felicity Jones, calls Jacob (Anton Yelchin) on a late night, after months apart and weeks of playing phone tag. She's in tears, her voice cracking, as she asks him if he wants to come over. The complication is that they're half a world apart, separated by thousands of miles of land and sea, and their relationship, which started with such splendor and optimism, has been challenged and altered so completely by that distance that they've contemplated giving it up. That phone call is the turning point, the emotional crux of an emotional film and the moment when we realize how doomed their relationship really is. Ingeniously, it's also the moment that we really start rooting for them, and that's all owed to the actors, both of whom give their hearts and souls to these characters. Jones, especially, is a revelation, and as one reviewer put it, "she will break your heart at least once" during this film. For me, it was far more than once.

 
 

Like Crazy, like many other semi-acclaimed love stories in recent memory (Blue Valentine, (500) Days of Summer), is a film that focuses more on the disintegration of a relationship than it does on it's formation. The early moments of the film play out in choppy segments, telling how the two came together and how they fell in love in brief flashbacks. The relationship isn't given a lot of time to bloom here, an interesting choice, since the effectiveness of the film lies entirely on the audience believing in that relationship, which, against any odds, we do. Completely. Yelchin and Jones have an instant spark of chemistry that transcends the minimalistic screenplay (which was apparently almost completely improvised anyway), and that spark builds so quickly that we almost don't register it happening. And yet, by the time they are separated, it's impossible not to buy into their strong feelings for one another.

Anyone who has ever been in love or had to endure a long distance relationship will find plenty of moments, both euphoric and heartbreaking, to relate to throughout this film. Personally, the film enveloped me immediately and never let me go; it still hasn't. There are moments in this film that continue to haunt me even as I write this, moments that I have thought about over and over again since this credits began to roll on Friday night. For me, that's the mark of a terrific film, and that's the reason why, the further I get from this film, the more I want to see it again and the more I want to call it one of the best films of the year. Much like in last year's Blue Valentine, a film that would have probably ended up as my second favorite of the year and one that resulted, in my opinion, in both of the best leading performances of 2010, you won't catch either of these performers acting here, and much like that film, there are moments in Like Crazy that legitimately hurt to watch. A fight that takes place about two-thirds of the way through never explodes into the all out furor we've come to expect from dramatic relationship movies (Revolutionary Road built a whole movie out of that kind of over the top acting), but the end result is far more devastating. Yelchin loses his temper, but Jones plays the scene with an understated fragility that is completely real, and we can feel her heart breaking as the scene unfolds; it breaks ours too.

 
 

By the time the screen cut to black and the sounds of Stars' "Dead Hearts" heralded the film's coda, I was emotionally exhausted. Some will find the ending cheap and unsatisfying. I myself thought I hated it when I sat in that theater seat, hoping that maybe there would be one more scene, but the further I get away from it, the more I believe that there is no other way the film could have ended. The final scene doesn't feel like an ending. Suddenly, the screen goes black and this song starts playing and we're supposed to make sense of what happened, but it feels like these characters and their story were left unfinished. But when I thought about it, about what that ending meant, what it could have symbolized, it made perfect sense. The thing with these sad romance films is that there is always a character we as the audience side with. In Blue Valentine, I couldn't help but feel for Gosling's character as he hopelessly tried to hold on to a woman who had clearly fallen out of love with him. And I don't think I've met a single (500) Days of Summer fan who didn't sort of hate Zooey Deschanel's Summer for breaking Joseph Gordon Levitt's heart. In both of those movies, there was always one person who was more in love than the other, the person who was giving up everything to help out with a child who wasn't even his or the person who was imagining big Hall & Oates musical numbers in the middle of everything. In this movie, it's Anna who drives the relationship all along, from making the first move to deciding to stay with Jacob to sacrificing everything to be with him, and as a result it's her we feel connected to. Yelchin plays Jacob with a detached distance for much of the film: only rarely does he seem as passionate as Anna. But she's the one who is completely in love from the get go, which only makes that cut-to-black ending that much more heartbreaking. As she thinks back on what their relationship used to be, contrasting it with what it is now, it's one of the most devastating moments of cinema this year. Nothing needs to be voiced. There's no dialogue, just silence and thought, but something just doesn't feel right. And that the film doesn't explicitly state the fate of their relationship is a masterstroke, a powerful, moving and thought-provoking, if sudden, ending that hasn't left my mind since I saw it happen.



The best films are the ones that attach themselves to your mind after your first viewing and stay there, for days, weeks, even months, all the way until you see them again and the whole process starts over. There will be a lot of people who will hate this film for precisely the reasons that I was so moved by it. There are a lot of people who will write it off as a schmaltzy, dramatic love story, and they have a point, but sometimes, love is just that, and this film's beautifully realized, living, breathing portrait of a flawed relationship makes for the most "real" film I've seen all year, and one that I'm tempted to place among the best. I don't expect this film to earn much awards attention. Like Blue Valentine, there's not a best picture nomination in it's future, and that will likely hold true for other categories. If it gets any notice at all though, I hope it comes in the form of a Best Actress nomination for Felicity Jones, who, I think, gives the best performance of the year, in any category, and deserves every accolade that will likely be stolen by flashier but less lived in performances. But then again, when a film hits me so hard in such a personal way, I'm not quite so inclined to care about those things.