Romantic people (especially women) have a tendency to desire from real life what they get out of romantic movies. Typically surrounding the central conflict and one or two easily-conceived character flaws within a love story are perfect words (which we forget were born of a professional writer’s sleepless nights), even more perfectly imperfect dates (He embarrassingly gets his ice cream on his face, the poor guy…but no! She licks it off, initiating a strawberry make-out session!), and everything is resolved in a couple of hours, temporarily satiating the romantic movie-goers lust for a whimsical, fairytale love affair. Eventually, though, you must go home to your real boyfriend, girlfriend, and/or cats. The thing about real people and cats is that they don’t have a script. Besides, if your real boyfriend sounds anything like Ryan Gosling in Crazy, Stupid, Love for example, you should be very skeptical of his sexual history, and if your cats sound like that, you should either seek psychological help immediately, or send videos of them to Ripley’s.
The point is, most movies are just a slice of life…pizza. And these slices are usually “cheesy” with a few surprise peppers, maybe a really big, interrupting bubble, and just a few sour notes of…something sour that might be on a pizza. In real life, though, there is a whole pie, some slices of which may be covered in terrible anchovies or just plain and boring. While some movies have made an attempt at giving the accepted romantic recipe a twist in the after taste (Hold up, he doesn’t end up with her? B-b-b-but, they were totally just playing house in IKEA! Okay, Ashley Greene is in the waiting room…sounds like a happy ending for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to me!), not many dive right into the deep-dish like Paramount’s Like Crazy.
I guess now is the part where I stop hiding behind bad analogies and even worse jokes to conceal how emotional I anticipate this movie to be. As someone who is head over last season’s nude heels in love with a guy during one of the most difficult times in both of our lives, I am positive, given extensive research and previewing, that it will make any one who has ever been in a relationship laugh, weep, and essentially ride an emotional roller coaster that is both much scarier and more exhilarating than the simulated one in the Regal Theaters introduction with corn kernels popping in your face. Okay, that’s the last time I do that. Seriously though – saying that love is a tough subject is gross understatement. It is the most versatile and chaotic actuality that you can share with someone.
Besides maybe your parents, who else have you wanted so badly to both hug and strangle in the same day? Who else could you one day want to be so far away from that he or she could never hurt you, and the next want to be so close to that you could dissolve into one another – like physics alone could never quell the intimacy that you crave. You can want nothing more than to be free of ties to another human along with their wants and needs while you absorb as much of existence as you can, yet you simultaneously want more than anything for that person to be tied to you throughout it all, knowing that you need to have had a significant other at some point to have really felt alive. Even if it ends, love is the epitome of the human condition. Drake Doremus strives to portray an honest account of this kind of love in a way that promises to take you not only up and down with it, but also side to side and diagonal as it radiates in all directions from its plausible center (a long-distance relationship scenario), fracturing the heart of the romance genre in all the right places. “[This movie’s objective], I guess, is that love is gray and relationships are gray,” Doremus says, ”Long-distance relationships especially are difficult to sustain…just because you’re not fully with somebody doesn’t mean you’re not sort of half with that person. This film ultimately covers what it feels like to try to fight to get over somebody and sort of not be able to.”
In a popular culture where superficial, passive pleasures rule the box office while novelty and grit are reserved for the more avid film consumer to trip over on Netflix or ardently pursue at an under-marketed film festival, it is no wonder that this gem is taking the scenic route to Orlando’s movie theaters, having made its most influential stop in Park City, Utah. Like Crazy has been nicknamed “the darling of Sundance” by film critics, and by film critics I mean my movie-loving friend Mike, who I thank for the phrase and for seriously suggesting that we take a road trip to New York to see the film. My college budget caught its breath when I discovered the Orlando release date of November 18th. Money aside, the road trip would have been well worth seeing the winner of the Sundance Film Festival 2011’s “Grand Jury Prize for Best Picture” with stellar performances by “Special Jury Prize for Best Actress” winner Felicity Jones and Star Trek movie and Hearts in Atlantis actor Anton Yelchin. While Anton was a given for the role of Jacob, Felicity sent in an unconventional audition tape of her performing the last scene (in the shower!) of the movie to win over the director for the role of Anna. Merely speaking with them and director, Drake Doremus, yielded anticipation of a film that speaks genuinely, not only to love’s beauty and thrill, but also to its detriment.
Remember what I said about real living entities not having a script for life? Much of Like Crazy’s naturalism is owed to Doremus’s technique of writing only a film’s skeleton in the form of an outline, allowing the story’s dialogue and detail to flow organically through the actor’s interpretation and execution of what is initially just “scene objectives, emotional plot points, and subtext”. Of this technique, the director also says he was “really inspired to try to do something that didn’t feel staged or homogenized, that just really resonated with audiences…the whole goal of the movie was to try to strike a chord with anybody that’s ever really been in love and that’s been infatuated with somebody and hasn’t been able to let go.” Having grown up in the improvisation world with his mother (founder of The Groundlings Improv and Sketch Comedy Troupe in Los Angeles), Doremus strongly advocates the acting method and was the ideal writer and director to bring this human experience to the film as seamlessly as possible.
The film was also shot with a Canon 7d, which is actually a type of hand-held video camera. This made for a strongly indie, real feel that is kind of like the characters, Jacob and Anna, grabbing your hand and bringing you along for a tumultuous ménage et trois. With a camera that fit into the every space of their complicated relationship and the lack of a studio, Anton says that this film could reach any audience and will have a very broad appeal while often the “indie is often used sort of colloquially”. The amount of footage acquired through Drake’s directing is unusually ample, as he insists upon shooting scenes from many different angles, making the final cut a surprise to the whole cast and just one perspective of the action. The film also boasts an original and always-appropriate, piano-based score.
Unfortunately, the wide-release movie does have its departure from its original film festival form. Relegated to a PG-13 rating, a sex scene was apparently removed from the theatrical version. I decided to ask Anton and Felicity about the motive for the rating change. “Well, they thought that [such a hardcore scene] would alienate audiences,” he joked, “basically…it really doesn’t effect the cut at all and I’d be the first person to – I mean, we’d both be really upset [if it did].” Felicity added, “We were both really worried but then when we saw the cut…it actually improved the scene rather than taking away…It’s a film that really does appeal to every age…it’s great that everyone will be able to see it.” Even sans sex scene, Anton and Felicity more than adequately emote their characters’ passion. Though they insist that they played their characters tremendously different from themselves, they spent a lot of time getting to know each other (having dinners and making each other laugh) in order to render the chemistry such an authentic project required of them.
Though the words “Girls Knight Out” often conjure images of flavorful alcoholic slushies and a whole lot of giggling, you can’t deny the necessity of intermittently undergoing a cathartic theatrical experience. Pretending you don’t love him anymore will only manifest itself in the strange ways that repression destroys you, and the solo Lifetime movie and Ben & Jerry’s is just counter-productive, not to mention archaic. You can even brave the movie with your significant other as he pretends to have allergies. After the lost loves are done crossing your minds and you allow yourselves to indulge in thoughts of happiness with each other, perhaps you’ll exult in a fit of passion you can’t contain until you get home, steaming up the windows like a couple of high schoolers in the movie theater parking lot before curfew – for old time’s sake. Either way, you need to see this movie Like Crazy. After all, instead of scrutinizing our love lives for not imitating movies, it’s about time we commend the movies that truly imitate life’s love. In the mean time, I need to go make a phone call…