Like Crazy

 

3 Stars

Love is an endlessly renewable resource, yet the fuel's so seldom used wisely.

The new film "Like Crazy" strives to capture that head-swiveling sensation of falling, and then falling out, and then back in again, as it pertains to the sense-defying, metaphysically boggling realm of time and space known as "your 20s."

The reason to see it co-stars with Anton Yelchin, around whom the project got going. Her name is Felicity Jones.

She plays Anna, a highly verbal, naturally sociable Londoner attending college in Los Angeles on a student visa. In class, delivering a paper on social media, communication and matters of the heart, she makes eyes at budding furniture designer Jacob (Yelchin), who is doodling in his notebook yet fully aware of the woman up in front. She makes the first move; he responds, and after a few minutes of screen time, co-writer and director Drake Doremus' feature makes us feel like intimate confidants of these two.

To the degree it follows a conventional story, "Like Crazy" is simplicity itself, hinging on a clear mistake. Carefree Anna willfully overstays her visa. For much of the film's 89 minutes, the American and the Englishwoman find themselves separated, forcibly. Jacob, conflict-avoidant and secretive by nature, falls sideways into a relationship with a work associate played by Jennifer Lawrence of "Winter's Bone." Anna, similarly, slips and falls into it with a neighbor (Charlie Bewley) who turns out to be an uptight control freak. We're never entirely sure about Anna and Jacob's chances for success together.

This is one of the film's strengths. For every yellow-highlighter moment or aren't-they-adorable montage, there's a pang of truth, none more authentic than the chord on which "Like Crazy" lands. Yelchin understands Jacob, a character who drifts in a fog of half-awareness. He's not yet a fascinating actor; Jones, however, is.

She has the added benefit of playing the more fleshed-out of the two leads, interacting regularly with her loving, slightly suffocating parents played by Alex Kingston and Oliver Muirhead; Jacob lost one of his parents when he was 10.

With its photogenic trips to the beach and frequent, naturally integrated scenes of trans-Atlantic texting, "Like Crazy" unspools like a home movie made by a director in love with the French new wave but no stranger to something a little schlockier -- "A Man and a Woman," say. One of Anna's poems to Jacob contains a line about "the semiprecious eagerness" of what she's feeling.

It's entirely possible, maybe even inevitable, that "Like Crazy" will win over a good many moviegoers despite its bouts of semipreciousness. In the end, I was one of them. True love, the movie seems to say, doesn't answer any question. Rather, it poses a tough one of its own: What are you going to do with it?

 

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"Like Crazy" Movie Trailer

 

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for sexual content and brief strong language).

Running time: 1:29.

Cast: Anton Yelchin (Jacob); Felicity Jones (Anna); Jennifer Lawrence (Sam); Charlie Bewley (Simon); Alex Kingston (Jackie); Oliver Muirhead (Bernard).

Credits: Directed by Drake Doremus; written by Doremus and Ben York Jones; produced by Jonathan Schwartz and Andrea Sperling. A Paramount Vantage release.

 

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