Like Crazy

Don't let it's indie roots fool you. Like Crazy is a nostalgic love story of people who know what they want but don't know how to get it.

The acting is superb. Yelchin and Jones have chemistry and they play it across the board. You will smile, laugh, cry, and hold your breath as these two characters waltz in and out of each others' lives. Jennifer Lawrence and Charlie Bewley also deliver great performances.

The thing that sets Like Crazy apart is the fact that it doesn't try to be anything than an honest love story. It doesn't play up stereotypes. It doesn't beat out the indie clichés. The dialogue is naturally paced and feels richly authentic. The subtext is dramatic.

This film is worth every dollar and dime in my mind. If you get the chance, go see it. Take friends who want to share the fun of a good film.

Like Crazy is a fantastic watch and a fresh take on everything you thought you knew about indie romance.

Just saw it at the Sundance Film Festival here in Park City, Utah.'Like Crazy' is a love story about the ups and the downs, the euphoria, the heartache, and the sacrifices. For those who don't know the plot, basically a British student, Anna, falls for Jacob, an American student. They fall for each other right away, and spend the summer together. However, she violates the stay of her student visa, and when she tries to return to L.A., she is denied. Thus, our two lovers are separated by distance and multiple levels of bureaucracy that prove to be most unfair. Can they make it work, and should they? Some have compared it to '500 Days of Summer,' and there are a few similarities. The major difference is the lack of any unique narrative devices and that it is, in fact, a love story. First and foremost, let me say that Felicity Jones as Anna is a revelation. She owns the screen and was utterly charming and devastatingly beautiful. There's a scene in the first 10 minutes after they spend their first evening together, and they sit on her bed, and a sense of tension but young awkwardness that fills the room. When the conversation falters out, she gives him a look that was filled with such delicate longing; fueled by the power of young love and the possibilities before them. It was in this moment that Anna, and Felicity, won me over. The chemistry between her and her co-star Anton was realistic and powerful. Much of the film was improvised; the director said he would often leave the camera rolling for twenty to thirty minutes at a time just to capture them together. It shows. I felt myself hoping and wishing for them to work it all out, to end up together.

The music is fantastic. It provides the heartbeat to the film and is a wonderful compliment. It's well edited - the film ultimately takes place over what seems to be a couple of years. Unlike early versions of the film, title cards have been removed and a series of jump cuts progresses the time. You have to pay close attention at times to have a firm grasp on the passage of time. There are moments when they are happy and together that are so iconic. Walking the streets of London, at times they looked like the cover of a Bob Dylan cover. Quick cuts of them together whether in LA or London are quite beautiful.

This film was obviously made based on real experiences, and the filmmakers admitted that it was the combination of many of their experiences. It's a realistic film. Things aren't easy. You will smile and laugh and other times feel just as much despair as our characters. There are no easy answers in this film, and your ultimate interpretation and perhaps enjoyment of the film depends on what you bring to the table, and your feelings on love, and just how much you believe in it. This film should make Felicity Jones a star in the way that 'An Education' benefited Carey Mulligan.

As the movie's title suggest, I truly wanted to fall in crazy love with "Like Crazy". By the end, I instead just gave it a pat on the shoulder and became more interested in what the stars and director would be doing after the movie than in the film that just screened. In a movie about the complications that ensue when an American guy named Jacob and a British girl named Anna meet in college, fall in love and then eventually are separated when the latter is denied entry back into the US after overstaying her visa, it's never as compelling as it very well should have been.

"Like Crazy", a big hit at the Sundance film festival, is well-made and has some scenes of heartbreaking immediacy that give it considerable promise. Unfortunately it only shines through it's individual moments, but as a whole it lacks a certain emotional center as the main romantic pairing, played by Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin, is just not convincing.

Not for lack of trying. Director Drake Doremus has certainly made a lovely film out of a very small budget, and again proves (after his first film Douchebag) that he has a way of coaxing some nuanced performances out of familiar character archetypes. It's refreshing to see a movie where people don't always know the perfect thing to say and end up saying what they actually feel, or feeling unable to say anything at all. And his understated mis-en-scene and on-the-cheap cinematography is quite impressive, bringing a very cinematic atmosphere to "Like Crazy" despite the film's modest means.

For the central pairing, Jones (a distinctly lovely actress with a remarkably subtle face and physical acting style) in particular brings a fascinating duality to her character of Anna: she can feel both warm and reserved, naive but very intelligent and observant. Jones slowly melds what could initially seem like a contradiction into a very real, imperfect human character that you can't quite understand but you can feel remarkably close to, and it's easy to see how someone could be very drawn to her. Anton Yelchin, as Jacob, has the much harder task: his Jacob has an almost too-passive interest in this love affair, but while the character on the page might be too much of a cipher, Yelchin has a clever acting style that suggests there's more to Jacob than meets the eye.

And there's no questioning that "Like Crazy" is a consistiently engaging and intriguing experience. There's just a big problem when the central romance in an in-and-out-of-love story is the weakest part of film. Their relationship ultimately feels completely tied to plot, with no real sense that it would exist off camera. We become interested in Jacob and Anna individually, but never as a couple.

Jacob seems rather unwilling to uproot his life to be with her, or even borrow money from her parents so he can stay the post-graduation summer in England, and it is a bit baffling to wonder how someone as smart (or supposedly smart) as Anna would be willing to overlook his slowly growing indifference and find out far too late that their romance is dying.

There's a bit of suspense later on, as both Jacob and Anna get romantically tempted by someone close to them (by Jennifer Lawerence and Charlie Bewley, respectively), but that plot devolpment ultimately feels as superficial and mechanical as the movie's main immigration predicament. It's more an affirtmation of Lawrence's considerable talents as an actress that she takes a role as contrived as this and ends up making the audience truly feel her heartbreak. Though it's a big problem when we're more torn up over the affair rather than the movie's main romance.

It's not that there isn't a sense of real care and affection between Jacob and Anna, but the movie just doesn't take enough time to let us figure out exactly what exists between the two. It seems like while Anna may be in crazy stupid love, Jacob seems to see it as a passionate summer fling but nothing to change his life for. You end up wishing they would just move on and live their lives rather than root for them to make it through their immigration-complicated struggle, as the feelings just do not seem to be reciprocated. The disintegration of their relationship feels more expected and, frankly, welcome than it is heartbreaking.

Perhaps what's hindering the central romance is that the movie is far too hurried and uneven that it doesn't really have time to show a substantive, organic growth of Anna and Jacob's relationship. The early scenes of Jacob and Anna's romance are far too brief (with an excessive fondness of montages and quick scene cuts) and far too much screen time is spent after Anna's banned from the US that "Crazy" never really has time to breathe. There's never any time to truly reveal what would make these two would-be romantics not only connect but fall passionately in love with each other. Surely it's more than a mutual love for Paul Simon's "Graceland" or rides in go-karts (yep, that's in the movie too).

Perhaps it's a compliment to say that the film should've been a bit longer, but it also means we're left needing more. The movie does have a potentially terrific ending, but too bad the charming but uncogent scenes before make it an afterthought rather than something more potent and emotional. That makes the whole experience just all the more tantalizing and disappointing. We haven't fallen in love with "Like Crazy", we're just enamored with what could've been.

"I thought I understood it. But I didn't. I knew the smudgeness of it. The eagerness of it. The Idea of it. Of you and me." Anna (Felicity Jones)

Like Crazy is about the craziness of love without a Hollywood spin but with a conventional story that tells it like love is: unadorned, raw, a puzzle, and a disappointment. Director Drake Doremus handed the outline to actors Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin and the rest was an organic script, albeit weaker than ones Brit director Mike Leigh develops with his cast.

Although the dialogue is spare and prosaic, the realism is spot on as the young couple struggles most of all with long distance. She is on visa from the UK to study in LA. He meets her at college; she overstays her visa time and is banned from returning to the US until a lengthy process of appeal is followed.

Those who have struggled with that distance demon know how right the artists get the frustrations and changes that plague those who challenge cupid across the pond over too long a time.

Although many traditional moviegoers will not like the ending, they can be comforted that it is, alas, only too true. If nothing else, Like Crazy is a textbook study of long distance love that should be a caution before young lovers attempt the navigation.

This is a love story that was quite interesting to me, because the parts that didn't work were the parts dealing with the actual love. Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin were both excellent on their own, burning with pain while trying to move on with their life and just exist with this hole inside of them. However it was when they were together that the film lost it's appeal for me. I couldn't feel any chemistry between them, so I had no stake in a large majority of it because I didn't understand why they wanted to be together. Even with their first meeting they seemed so dour together, I never once felt any genuine love there.

The conversations between them were good and honest, albeit typical, and the fact that they improvised a lot of their dialogue makes it more impressive. Unfortunately the premise hinges on an event that I couldn't realistically buy for a second so any sadness the characters felt didn't have enough of an impact on me because there was always this looming anger towards them for being so dumb and getting themselves in this situation. The ending is a smart move, but it's also a pretty straight Graduate rip-off, so I can't commend it too much.

I'm harping a lot on the things that I didn't like about the film, but I think ultimately there were more positives than negatives for me. The actors really shined individually, even if they didn't sell the core relationship for me, and quite a few of their separate scenes gave me an emotional reaction, albeit not to the extreme that they should have hit me. So I'm pretty lukewarm on it overall, but I at least admired the acting.