To be in a relationship people gotta work, you know...they must be present, make a commitment/investment of time and money and energy because it gets tricky, and that’s when the two people are in the same place.
Imagine what it’s like when you have an ocean between ya. No...can’t? Then check out the indie Like Crazy, a largely improvised film following the story of two young hearts in love but torn asunder for years by the crazyness that the American immigration system can be sometimes (I have strong feelings about this) and their romantic recklessness.
Anton Yelchin and British newcomer Felicity Jones play the couple at hand, Jacob and Anna.
They meet while finishing college in L.A. – he’s a budding furniture designer, she’s a writer – and fall in love. It’s beautifully refreshing how...normal they are, how writer-director Drake Doremus resisted making them aggressively hipster-y and thus, how he made them so approachable. I’d like to think that’s why Like Crazy earned top honors at last winter’s Sundance Film Festival and why Jones was named Best Actress: the film isn’t terribly affected.
Anyway, from the first date the two become adorably inseparable. She’s a bit more in it to win it than he, but you can tell there’s genuine feeling there. Perhaps Jacob’s apprehension has to do with him be the realist, with his knowing that what they have is expiration dating since Anna will have to go back to the U.K. soon.
Except she doesn’t.
She foolishly decides to overstay her student visa, and that’s the moment the film transcends its cuteness and gets real for this isn’t something they will be able to overcome in a nice montage because a rom-com this ain’t, and thank goodness for that, alright.
The relationship becomes interrupted and therefore, strained. She really can’t come back to America and he can’t, or won’t move to London since his job is keeping him in Santa Monica (’cause his chairs are selling like hot cakes, which is funny since it seems his most popular design is the one inspired by a chair he gave to her at the beginning of the affair).
Separated, Jacob and Anna embark on relationships with other people, while staying in each other’s lives. He starts up with a co-worker (Jennifer Lawrence) and sees ready to move on, while she hooks up with a hunky neighbor (the oh-so-hunky Charlie Bewley).
But they belong together. After years – I calculated about four – of doing a dance of going back and forth whenever possible for Jacob, of late-night calls, of trying to sort out Anna’s situation with America, and of taking a radical approach to their situation, Like Crazy ends on an ambiguous note, with Jones delivering the strongest point of view on the matter, on these two crazy kids’ love.
Doremus serves her better because she’s the one anchoring the story with her love, which is not to say that Yelchin isn’t deeply moving in his own right. This may not be a rom-com, but it is a rom-dram, and she’s the one carrying the love.
Whether the two end up together and working it out will be up to your interpretation. But don’t doubt the true-ness of this one because honest as heck.
My Rating ***1/2
Photo: Paramount Pictures.
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