Looks like a pretty good trailer right? At least to a female or overly sensitive male movie-goer. I was excited to see this movie. It won best film at Sundance. How bad could it be? Wellllll... Let's say this: I had a similar experience with Blue Valentine. I was all amped by the trailer (stupid sepia lighting and emo songs), but the movie was miserable! At least the acting in Blue Valentine was phenomenal. The story just made me want to slit my wrists. Anyways, back to Like Crazy. Oh look, a quirky English girl and could-be-cute-if-he's-funny unknown actor. An ideally perfect set up. The English girl wasn't that cool or charming and the male lead was a creepy mcreeperson who just wanted to pull some out of his league tail. She pursued him and was semi-endearing at times cause you felt bad for her but he was just kind of a weird creepy idiot. Never have I cared less about a couple than in this movie. Even the falling in love montages are stupid. Oh, we're driving go carts and throwing sand at eachother at the beach. Lame. First of all, the dialogue consists of overly laughing at nothing, one cliche semi-conversation about sleeping with other people, a few gasps, and more overly laughing at nothing (we get it, English girls have cute laughs). "Do you like whiskey mwuahahahaha. I like Paul Simon". What the hell... Each scene was littered with imagery to suck in the hipster elite: an Urban Outfitters bag here, an Anthropology mug there, a plethora of old lady dresses she wears (I owned one of them, dammit), flannel shirts and mussed up side braids everywhere. They should have just had Zoey Deschanel prancing by in the background. We get the message. Not to mention a crazy obsession with an Ikea looking wooden chair that supposedly symbolized their whole relationship. The chair is her. The chair is him. The chair is disappointment. The new chair is scary and unwelcome. Stop with the chair! The male lead is a furniture designer who literally sits around sketching a picture of the same exact chair design the whole movie. A standard, boxy, wooden chair. His business apparently starts booming, with this chair. And every time they cut to his professional environment him and his business partner discuss things like oh, wooden chairs, and different colors they can make wooden chairs. Maybe blue, maybe orange, mostly just plain wood colored. Overly obvious symbolism is obnoxious and really hard not to make fun of. I felt like I was in Mystery Science Theater 3000, which is saying a lot considering I was in a very sentimental, break-upy type mood so I was super susceptible to this film.
I won't be completely negative. There were a few good scenes, that, if stuck in any other movie, probably could have been great. But they were in this movie so I barely noticed them. There is a scene where she calls him after breaking up the first time and they do the dance of the awkward, let's pretend to be acquaintances talk very well. They talk about what's going on in their lives and it's cordial but hurtful at the same time and she hangs up. Then she gasps for air a little bit staring into space. We all know the subtle gasp. She immediately calls him back, teary eyed and regrettful and let's out a "....hi" that could break anyone's heart that has been through it before. The helpess feeling that something may not work out. Her phone calls to him throughout the movie do come across as authentic. She calls him another time and says simply "I feel so strongly that we are meant to be together. And I can't shake it. I don't think I will move on from it" The simple way she says things sometimes in this movie does and can tug at the heart strings. Cause you feel it. Then the movie snaps out of the dialogue, cause god forbid, and it starts to suck again. I am very interested in seeing the hard copy of the script because it was a pretty long movie and I already think I have alll of the dialogue memorized because there were so few words spoken.
There's also a scene depicted over one of their summers where they are laying in bed night after night in different spooning positions and it does remind how powerful the simple act of sleeping next to someone one a regular basis is, and how it will eternally bind you, apart or not. I liked that scene.
In the male actors defense, he does play a pretty believable "guy", just kind of being blase and not knowing what to do and shutting down to emotion and being kind of useless in most situations. The whole time you're thinking "Why doesn't he just live in England? There are chairs there! This can all be solved." But he's got a piece of ass in the States so I guess that made sense. It was disappointing cause it was too boring and too much like relationships that we've all unfortunately seen, minus the whole Visa thing I guess. It's a lame try at a relationship. Not an overcome-all-obstacles love story which, I guess, even I am a sucker for. I half wanted him to bust out the "I've gone to see about a girl" line! At the end of the movie, and I don't care if this is a spoiler because I am doing you a favor, they have gotten back together one more time and are standing in the shower together and do a drapey armed hug. They show each characters' face and a reminiscence of their happy times together. They show the girls face remembering him and how she began to love him, a sequence of his best moments. Then they show the same with him, remembering her in the past, and why he's there. Why they've tried to make it work all this time. You immediately relate to it and start running a movie reel in your own head about your ex or your past relationships. If there's love, you reel over the reasons how it possibly didn't work out. If these two can make it work, can't anyone? And you think, this is the movie's pinnacle. Some great emotional conversation is about to happen or maybe they'll break up for good with fond memories or maybe they'll figure out too much has changed to go back, or maybe they'll fall madly back in love without sad looks on their face... And then the credits roll. And just like if you have been in a similar type relationship as portrayed in this movie, you feel cheated.
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