Starring: Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones
Directed By: Drake Doremus
Written By: Drake Doremus and Ben York Jones
Produced By: Jonathan Schwartz and Andrea Sperling
Distributor: Paramount Vantage
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 90 minutes
Website: likecrazy.com
Budget: $250,000 (estimated)
Genre: Drama / Romance
Release Date: October 28, 2011 (limited)
The trailer for the new indie romance Like Crazy is extremely well-done, deftly blending images, sentiment and song into a delicate, thoughtful love story. In just two and a half minutes, it expertly captures the intense passion, comforting heartache and excruciating bliss of young lovers in love. Unfortunately, it’s a standard the movie itself can’t live up to.
Part of the problem is scale. Relationships are about small things – longing glances, inside jokes, knowing smiles. They are, by definition, intimate. But director Drake Doremus stretches his extremely simple story across an unknown number of years to make it seem more epic than it actually is. In practice, it simply calls attention to how little substance there actually is, both to the relationship, and to the film itself.
Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones play the star-crossed couple, who meet-cute on a university campus after Jones leaves a rambling confession of interest under Yelchin’s windshield wiper. She is an aspiring writer visiting from London; he builds custom furniture. We spend time with the couple on their first date, laughing with them as they apprehensively get to know each other, and then not laughing as their longing becomes more apparent. There is clearly chemistry between them.
All too quickly, the semester is over, and Jones must return to England. The couple exchanges goodbye gifts and pledges to wait for each other for an excruciating three months. But on the eve of her departure, Jones changes her mind and remains in the States in violation of her student visa. Weeks later, she foolishly returns to England to attend a wedding, and is then surprised to learn she can no longer enter our country.
Months and years pass haphazardly as the young lovers wait for the visa ban to be lifted. She accepts an internship at a trendy magazine; he sets up his own carpentry shop. He visits her family in England but feels separate from the life she’s built. She suggests they see other people. Only the type of cell phone they use while leaving tearful late-night voicemails or needy text messages provides any hint of how long it’s been since the previous scene.
As fate and red tape continue to keep them apart, the couple weds out of a mix of desperation, inertia and misguided loyalty, but with the passion gone, they’re soon seeing other people in their respective home countries. Yelchin moves in with Jennifer Lawrence, who is beautiful, funny and loves him unconditionally. Jones gets stuck with self-absorbed soccer hooligan Charlie Bewley, who curbs her love of scotch and puts her on a diet. Both are more human obstacles than actual characters.
Shot on a shoestring budget with a consumer-grade DSLR camera, Like Crazy benefits from all the realism and intimacy shooting on the fly offers. Freed from the limitations of bulky cameras and industrial-grade lighting, the filmmakers are able to work more quickly and loosely than with traditional equipment. The images they capture are gorgeous; the largely-improvised dialogue is not. Too many scenes lack any focus or forward momentum; a particularly tedious argument in Jones’s London apartment drags on for far too long as each of the leads refuses to advance the scene in any way.
Whenever the soundtrack takes over during one of the film’s slick and sometimes inventive montages, the film soars. Character actor Oliver Muirhead and former “ER” star Alex Kingston steal every scene they’re in as Jones’s laid-back parents. But a movie can’t just substitute heavy-handed symbolism and a good soundtrack for character development and call it a day. In the end, Doremus and co-writer Ben York Jones don’t show enough of the young couple’s good times to keep the audience engaged during the bad ones.
2.5 Stars (out of 5)
