Crazy Stupid, All Right

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Crazy, Stupid Love got some really rave reviews, so I had high hopes when we saw it Friday night. And to be clear, the parts of the movie featuring the actor the interwebs call "your boyfriend Ryan Gosling" are fabulous. He and Emma Stone have mad chemistry. And as the "player" in this rom-kinda-com, his character could have been crass and stereotyped; but the writing and his own awesome self make him original and just great to watch.

The Steve Carell-Julianne Moore portion of the movie, not so much. There are lots of stupid stock scenes that are as tired as they are implausible. Carell and Moore are great actors, and the movie can be funny as hell and sometimes sweet. But they are mostly walking through a series of romantic-comedy checkboxes.

Worse than the cliches, though, is the sexual politics of the movie. Julianne Moore's character has had an affair at the beginning of the movie, and she never stops being punished for it. Steve Carell's character, Cal, follows with a long string of one-night-stands which he gets a little comeuppance for but which is mainly played for laughs and a kind of satisfying revenge.

Worst of all, though, is the icky subplot of Cal's 11-year-old son who has a crush on his 15-year-old babysitter, who in turn has a crush on Cal. First of all, NO. And second of all, as in so many movies, the boy's desire ennobles him while the girl's desire demeans her. She tells the boy several times, Stop; this has got to stop. But he is encouraged to "go for his dreams" and "never stop trying." She, on the other hand, is made to take naked pictures of herself to send to Cal, which are discovered by her parents before she has a chance to send them. We are treated to a scene in which her mother submits the photos to her father, who stares at them at length. Both parents bypass the girl entirely, and the father runs off to beat up Cal. Which in itself is a pretty funny scene, but it would have to be a hundred times funnier to make the preceding one palatable.

But the whole thing does what it's supposed to do, which is to teach each kid a lesson. The boy learns that following the strength of his conviction is an important passage to manhood. The girl learns that her desires are unhealthy and mistaken. His desires lead to a payoff. Her desires lead to public humiliation.  For the whole second half of the movie, I was waiting for the inevitable denouement of this little morality play, the one where she finally caves in to the rightness of his campaign and rewards him with his first kiss. At the middle-school graduation scene at the end of the movie, you see it coming. There in the crowd he spots her, standing alone and luminous in her billowy romantic dress. He walks over to her to make peace, say he understands that she just wants to be friends. Does she say, Good, I'm glad you finally got that? Does she bend down and tenderly kiss his cheek?

God help us, she hands him one of the naked pictures of herself. To help "get [him] through high school."

Well, all has turned out as it should. She's learned that what is seemly in a girl is to be the object of desire, to be a source of sexual inspiration for boys, and  to accept that role graciously. But NOT to have desires herself, which will only embarrass her. And so it is throughout our culture. Buying a copy of Maxim with Olivia Wilde on the cover? Rock on. Buying a magazine with Rob Pattinson on the cover? La-ame.

So, all in all, disappointing. There is good stuff in this movie, though, and it makes me wonder what the original script looked like. Maybe the grosser and more contrived aspects are the result of studio meddling.
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