A few genuinely funny moments completely smothered by an overall insulting premise.

Rating: Null/10 (24 August 2011)

Comedies have not had a good track record with me in recent years. Crazy, Stupid, Love didn't present much via trailer to keep me from pre-assigning a bad review, but what the heck – that's why we watch the movies!
CSL (as it will be called for brevity's sake) opens with about 90% of the trailer – Emily (Julianne Moore) wants a divorce, Cal (Steve Carell) can't handle it and jumps out of the car. Cal meets Jacob (Ryan Gosling), professional womanizer, and transforms from a simple, committed husband to a complete sleaze-bag. Meanwhile, Jessica likes Cal, Robbie likes Jessica, David likes Emily, Hannah likes Jacob, Molly likes TV, TV likes trailers for CSL, and we all follow with ease despite the attempts at misdirection.
The wheels really came off in the second half as all these story lines attempt to resolve and still try to bring the funny. As Carson on ScriptShadow says, "the first 60 (minutes) were all one big setup, and the last sixty (minutes) are a continuous ESPN ticker feed of payoffs." Unfortunately, he was talking about the script which I'm going to assume was significantly better than the film itself. Character development poses a problem for the payoffs. Actions indicate that each and every one of the characters are not just flawed, realistic people, but the kind of morally bankrupt individuals that can only come from the Hollywood mind. We're to believe that despite sleeping with a number of women in the what 4 months of separation from his wife, that Cal still really loved his wife throughout it all? That would fly if he slept with one woman, had remorse, and settled in to the main plot of trying to win his soul mate back, but we're supposed to believe his sincerity through some cliché dialog and a few pitiful acts of "love." Likewise, Jacob has slept with, if we follow the logic of the limited timeline we see, thousands of women. We're likewise to believe that in one hasty montage where he, for the first time, laughs and shows more than that half-dimension he was assigned, he's now a changed man? Cal's reaction to that is probably the most genuine moment in the entire film.
I can't even begin to unravel the twisted morals of that CSL throws at the audience. I don't go to movies to judge, honestly, but when the theme supposedly is "true love", this warped L.A. view on love insults anybody with a real relationship. If I were separated, slept with a dozen women, and then had the unmitigated gall to claim I never stopped loving my wife through it all, I would expect her to not just laugh in my face but also beat me to within an inch of my life. Cheating is one thing, but Cal's response to it is so odious that it just revealed that he never was the simple good-guy at the core. Once you pull that rug out from under the plot, there's nothing enjoyable or believable about this film.
As if audiences couldn't be insulted enough, this unabashedly Los Angeles-centric film was crudely dumped in to the indie film mold complete with quirky soundtrack, minimal locations, and lots of hand-held shots. Really? Do they think audiences can be fooled that easily? Them and critics both, apparently – Tom Long of the Detroit News thinks that this film should get an Oscar. He uses little phrases like "astoundingly strong ensemble" and "Gosling, probably the best dramatic actor of his generation" while wishing all the while he could get out of this hell-hole known as Detroit and live with the real people in California. Get a grip, man!
With a few genuinely funny moments completely smothered by an overall insulting premise, Crazy, Stupid, Love doesn't really give you anything to love.