Crazy, Stupid, Love

Review

The makers of Crazy, Stupid, Love, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, are too sane and (commercially) smart to make the craziness consequential and stupidity ruinous: After the whirlpools of Miranda July, we’re back on the rom-com mainland. But the movie has an unexpectedly high proportion of delights to groaners, and it’s full of actors you’ll want to see�real actors, like Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, and Emma Stone, their edges not blunted by years of making witless buddy movies and chick flicks. Gosling, alarmingly sleek and muscular, plays a trust-fund-wealthy pickup virtuoso who helps broken, newly dumped nebbish Steve Carell �rediscover his manhood� by teaching him how to dress and chat up the ladies�though sweetie-pie Carell still moons over Moore, his first and only love, who slept with her smarmy colleague (Kevin Bacon) and is now a wreck of wayward emotions. This is the sort of quasi-farcical picture in which Carell’s 13-year-old son (Jonah Bobo) longs for his 17-year-old babysitter (Analeigh Tipton) who longs for Carell who spies on Moore � The script, by Dan Fogelman, is unusually and gratifyingly bisexual�i.e., it boasts scenes from both the male and female points of view! One of those scenes is a gem, a keeper: sharp-witted Stone and Gosling in his bachelor pad, her pressing him to demonstrate his time-tested seduction routine�while simultaneously falling for it. Stone is amazingly vivid. She looks hungry to act and sometimes just hungry, as when she spontaneously bites Gosling’s shoulder in a wineshop. Half of the audience will moan, �I’d like some of that shoulder!� while the other half yells, �Bite me!� — David Edelstein