Not so stupid

Crazy, Stupid, Love
DIRECTED BY: Glenn Ficarra, John Requa
STARRING: Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Emma Stone
CERT: 15A

CRAZY, Stupid, Love is a lame, stupid, title.
But it’s one of the few bad things about the movie – an entertaining, old-fashioned romantic comedy for grown-ups, as opposed to the kind of crass, vulgar ‘adult’ romantic comedy that’s been crawling out of major studios in recent times.
As you might gather from the subtle title, it’s a film about relationships and it opens in the final moments of a marriage. Cal Weaver (Carell) and his wife Emily (Moore) have been married for 25 years. He’s settled and content but she clearly isn’t anymore. Because when he asks after dinner what she wants for dessert, she tells him she’d like a divorce.
Stunned, Cal moves out, shacks up in a depressing apartment and takes to a fancy cocktail bar to drown his sorrows. Here, he meets Jacob Palmer (Gosling), a smooth-talking ladies’ man who leaves every night with the fine looking woman of his choice, while Cal sits miserably in the corner, pouring out his tale of woe.
Perhaps out of pity for a fallen soldier, Jacob takes Cal under his wing, promising to teach him the ways of the master seducer, to turn him into a chick magnet – or as Jacob puts it, to restore his lost manhood.
Cue the old makeover montage. For girls, this involves bouncy music and 400 changes of clothes, sometimes with a few quirky hats and a feather boa thrown in for fun. For the lads – and for Cal – it’s time for a haircut, new shoes, and a few samples of 21st century men’s fashions, always including a sharper suit.
Dressed to kill, and with Jacob’s sage advice ringing in his ears, Cal hits the town and enjoys immense success with a girl called Kate (Marisa Tomei), a recovering alcoholic who seems to have channeled her addictive energies into becoming a bedroom champion.
On the family front, meanwhile, ex-wife Emily has been dallying with co-worker David (Kevin Bacon) and 13-year-old Robbie (Jonah Bobo) has developed a soul-consuming crush on Jessica (Analeigh Tipton), his 17-year-old babysitter. This detour into teenage infatuation is one of those things that should have been an early victim of the writer’s delete key, which would have spared us all the terrible spectre of a wise kid offering advice on love to his dense dad, and the even more awful spectacle of a rousing public speech on matters of the heart. You know the sort of thing – where most normal people cringe, and men hope their girlfriends aren’t crying.
Because, well, in my experience, women don’t like when you laugh at them.
In the midst of all this, the big surprise is that Jacob turns out to have a heart, too, when he meets the lovely Hannah (Stone) and is shocked to discover that she’s immune to his infamous charms. That he falls madly in love with her will only be a surprise if you haven’t ever seen a romantic comedy before. Or if you haven’t just read this paragraph.
It’s all played strictly to formula but, as someone once said about cliches, that doesn’t make it so wrong. Certainly not when you’ve got a script this sharp, and a cast this capable and willing to make it work.
Carell showed in Little Miss Sunshine that he can do drama and that he’s more than a one-trick pony. He shows some of the same stuff in Crazy, Stupid, Love – though this is by no means the film that will cut him loose from his comedy roots, not when it needs him to simultaneously play an unhappy divorcee and The 40-Year-Old Virgin who happens to have been Married For Quarter Of A Century.
As his unhappy wife, Julianne Moore probably has the least work to do and yet gets saddled with some of the weakest lines, like, “When did we stop being us? Oh, I don’t know.
Probably around the time when it became a legal obligation that every Hollywood script should contain the line, “What do you want from me?”
Emma Stone is similarly lumped with the lines that somehow evaded quality control but still manages to shine in her role and will no doubt soon be ranked with the A-list ladies and their cute adopted orphans.
But Ryan Gosling is the real star of the show, slipping into the sharp-talking ladykiller role with admirable ease and pulling off one-liners like a seasoned comic – as if he hasn’t spent his entire career up to now playing Mr Intense. He’s a fine actor, and as the female Hollywood watchers have been pointing out, a fine cut of a man who seems the natural heir to George Clooney.
There are worse things in life than that, I’m sure.