You guys. High expectations. NEVER TAKE THEM TO THE MOVIES. Admittedly, I’ve been head over heels, ridiculously excited for Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy ever since I stumbled across the aching trailer months ago. Oftentimes, you’d be able to walk past my room and hear Ingrid Michaelson crooning “Can’t Help Falling In Love With You” as I’d watch the trailer over and over, sniffling into my pillow. (I wasn’t always this cool but at least I’m here now, right?) The trailer was everything I could have hoped for- a lovely soundtrack, two fresh-faced indie actors, and, seemingly, the kind of love that could make your heart burst right out of your chest.
I finally got to see the film in Kendall Square Cinema this past weekend. To be clear, I didn’t hate it. In actuality, the more I think about it, the more the film, and the reasons why I was disappointed, begin to make sense. It just wasn’t what I was expecting. The movie centers around Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felcitiy Jones), two lovebirds that enter into a relationship with one another in their final year of college in L.A, and fall into trouble when Anna, from London, overstays her student Visa and is no longer permitted back into the U.S. The film chronicles the young couples attempts over a seven year span to keep their relationship alive, stopping and going as distance, time differences, career paths, and eventually, other people, get in the way. Through sharp camera pans from L.A. to London, the viewer gets to see glimpses of both Anna and Jacob, how they try to build their lives separately and yet always somehow keep coming back to one another; we catch glimpses of their conversations over the telephone and as the camera grazes over their iPhone conversations.
What struck me about the film is how little we actually get to know about the couple’s relationship. Doremus rarely takes us below the surface level, even as the film progresses. After a scene in which they go on their first date, we only get to know Anna and Jacobs relationship through a montage of them skipping around the beach and staring up at each other lovingly through glass windows. When Anna decides to stay in L.A. for the summer (a foolish, important decision that essentially deters their relationship later on), the audience only sees Jacob and Anna’s summer together in a breathless montage of the couple in bed. Where is the meat of their relationship? What did they do all the summer? What, so badly, attracts them to one another? Beyond all that, there is no denying that to his credit, in Like Crazy Doremus does a lot of things right. Through out the duration of the film, the director has complete faith in Yelchin and Jones, and in their chemistry, allowing them to completely improvise certain scenes, even stepping out of the room sometimes so it’s just the actors and the cameraman. This level of naturalism comes through quite beautifully in the film. It doesn’t feel like were seeing two talented actors absorbing characters. It feels like we are watching two people who have no idea there’s a camera pointed at them.
On Doremus’s part, this is unprecedented and probably one of the films most elusive features. I realize now that I came to watch this movie expecting to see a grand, sweeping feature about the power and the strength of young love. I came ready to bawl my eyes out, to soak myself in the pain of watching two people so in love with each other but under the wrong circumstances. I came ready to see love prevail. Instead, I saw a film about a couple that I wasn’t even sure should be together in the end. One reviewer I read said about the film ” as love stories go, this one ain’t so grand.” Maybe we all finally saw a realistic movie about romance. Maybe it’s what we needed.