Warm, Surprising, Funny, Grown-Up. Worth Seeing

Rating: 9/10 (17 August 2011)

"Crazy Stupid Love" is funny, warm, well-made, and grow-up. Ryan Gosling gives an Academy-Award winning performance as the lounge lizard who outdoes all lounge lizards. There are unexpected, politically incorrect, farcical moments, and at least one classic love scene that did something no other love scene I've ever seen has done. I laughed out loud and came close to crying.
Emily (Julianne Moore) tells her husband, Cal (Steve Carell) that she wants a divorce. Cal begs his wife to "stop talking." When she keeps talking, he throws his body out of a moving car. As a woman who has tried to talk to men about serious issues, and been frustrated by their occasional inability to respond, I loved that scene.
I thought I knew where this movie would go. The movie surprised me. Its biggest surprise was Ryan Gosling. Gosling has done nothing so far that made me look twice. "The Notebook" was one of the blandest and most forgettable movies I've ever seen, and his smaller movies tried too hard.
Gosling's Jacob the Lounge Lizard is one of the funniest, sharpest, subtlest performances I've ever seen. In every smarmy smile, in every delivery of the hackneyed pickup line, "Do you want to get out of here?" Gosling performs a razor-edge between dead serious and flat-out parody. Jacob is both a big joke on bar bravado and an awed salute to masculinity. Gosling demands that we grant Jacob the due of an alpha male, as if he were a silverback gorilla – or Frank Sinatra – even while he invites us to laugh uproariously at him. He's Buddy Love on steroids. And, finally, we are invited to see poignancy and even some heartbreak. Even if I hated the surrounding film – and I did not – I'd watch this movie again and again just to see Gosling in it.
Robbie (Jonah Bobo) has an unquenchable crush on his baby sitter. I kept waiting for the film to do something conventional with Robbie's love, but it never did – in fact it got a little weird – and I liked that. When I was that age, I was capable of that kind of love.
There is a tangle of subplots that weave together into a beyond-chance farcical lawn party that made me laugh and cry at the same time. The audience watches characters have their hearts ripped out, their dreams and plans smashed – and yet has to laugh. What feels like death inside of participants' hearts looks like a screwball ballet to observers.
"Crazy Stupid Love" includes a quiet love scene that is worthy to become a screen classic. It involves two cell phones and a pilot light. This scene poignantly salutes what real, adult love really is, at its best. Steve Carrel could not be better in this scene.