Our Review
Rima Sabina Aouf, MovieFix
The thing about love is, it's both bigger and smaller than what we tend to see in the movies. There might not be That One Person for you, and even if there is, that doesn't mean you get to end up together. Love is circumstance as much as destiny. But in reducing love to a bubble of syrupy simple carbs on screen, we often miss out on depth and intensity.
So it's a victory that Like Crazy's young love feels very real. Its protagonists, Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones), spend time dumbly staring at each other while the world disappears, admiring each other's mediocre art, and arguing through bristled chitchat about lunch. They bond over their favourite album, and its music becomes the soundtrack. Their lives are ordinary, but complete when they're together.
So when Anna's student visa runs out, she's doesn't want to leave Jacob in Los Angeles and wait at home in London for another to come through. Her decision to stay for the summer means she is later not allowed back into the US and the two are sentenced to years of painful, on-again off-again, long-distance romance.
Like Crazy is a tender indie romance that's as much about the lasting consequences of our youthful indiscretions as it is about love. On the downside, as anyone with a perpetually lovelorn friend can attest, other people's relationship dramas are kind of annoying. Often it seems like the problems are of their own making. Here, it seems like the problems are also of the filmmaker's making. Why, oh why can't Jacob just be the one to move? Crisis averted!
The film expects us to believe Jacob couldn't possibly pursue his furniture design aspirations in London when actually it's Anna, with a lucrative junior position at a fashion magazine, whose career would be derailed by a move to LA. When these thoughts pull you out of the couple's love spiral, it can be hard to find a way back in.
