Not So 'Crazy' in Love

             Everyone remembers their first love and the feelings that brought. It is something you can never forget because it was the first time you had that special connection and  thought it could overcome anything. Such was the case for Jacob and Anna, who tried to make their first love work even with a 5,000 mile distance between them. “Like Crazy” has been successful at film festivals, like Sundance, where it earned the title of Best Picture and lead actress Felicity Jones received a Best Actress nod. “Like Crazy” is an indie film, and obviously so because it is made apparent through its camera work and its story line. The love between them was cute, romantic, and relatable, but that did not overshadow the fact that the film was not as professional as I would have hoped.

The official poster of "Like Crazy" provided by Paramount Pictures.

This movie starts out as your typical “first love” type of story. Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Jones) meet in college in Los Angeles. She is from the U.K. and he is from L.A. Once her studies are completed, she was supposed to go back to England, but instead she decided to violate her student visa and spend the summer in bed with Jacob. When she went back home for a wedding, she was banned from returning to the U.S., putting a heavy strain on their relationship. They go through cycles of other people and then texting or calling each other out of the blue and rekindling their relationship. It is unhealthy because we see how happy they are when they are with other people and yet they keep going back to each other which causes them more pain. In the end, the ban gets lifted, but did they end up happy together? It is left open-ended. Writer and Director Drake Doremus made it seem like too much had happened between them for them to be truly happy again, but that is more up to interpretation.

The final moment of the movie as Jacob (Yelchin) and Anna (Jones) reflect over all the time and events that have passed through the course of their relationship. Picture Courtesy of the SundanceChannel.com

            “Like Crazy” showed its independent nature through some sloppy camera work as well as a slow, character driven story line. Whether it was intentional or not, the camera work was awful. It was shaky and blurry, and that was extremely distracting from what was going on in the story. I mean, have the filmmakers ever heard of a tripod before? Also this was a character driven story, and yet the characters were very underdeveloped. In the beginning you get a slight glimpse of their growing feelings for each other and how they get along, but past that, all you really know about them is that she is an English journalist, and he is an American furniture maker. Their motivations are not really known because their characters are vague. Towards the end they find other people to be with, and the audience starts to like the new people better! This is because throughout most of the movie we see a lot of dishonesty, a lot of tension, and a lot of trials between Anna and Jacob that proves they are better off apart. “Like Crazy” is what I like to call a “shout-a-long” because throughout the movie you want to scream things like, “What are you doing?! Obviously violating your visa is a bad idea.”  The director did not establish a great connection, the characters did not make good choices, and then we got to watch them grieve over their situation when they are the ones that caused it. There were bad choices made by both the director and the characters which made the film annoying.

            The reason this movie is doing so well is because it is everyone’s story. Doremus wrote and directed the film so that you could see yourself in every situation. Doremus justifies the undefined characters and the open ended story because he wants the entire audience to place themselves in the story, but that is not a smart directing choice. We already know our own stories; we paid to see theirs. It was a little unsatisfying.

            Granted I did appreciate the realistic way Doremus portrayed first love and how it feels impossible to let that go, and I did think the acting was amazing, but I just left the movie completely unfulfilled. The fact that the characters were undefined, self-destructive, and just plain foolish was a real turn off.