Like Crazy (**1/2)

I suppose in a perfect world everyone would have one all-consuming love affair, one that, much later, will be recalled in a gauzily lit, cineme verité montage of sexual euphoria, aimless conversation, and clear-skinned smiles. Soft piano music will be the soundtrack. It will seem much like the first half hour of this evocative romance from Drake Doremus.

The problem is, it’s never much more than evocative. The young L.A. college sweethearts (Anton Yelchin, Felicity Jones) seem nice enough, but Doremus employs the sloppy shorthand of taste as a proxy for actual character traits. That is, the fact that they both like a certain Paul Simon song (alluded to in the film’s title) doesn’t tell us anything much about these people. Nor does the improvised dialogue, although it’s delivered well. As circumstance requires separation—she has to return to her native England—I had no idea whether I thought they should get back together or not. Or maybe I didn’t care as much as I ought to have.


Doremus’s film also evokes, sometimes effectively, the way feelings fade with separation. As with the separated couple in Going the Distance—a more mainstream, yet actually more substantive, look at a long-distance relationship—technology fails to take the place of being in the same place. The [slight spoiler ahead] his-and-hers side relationships—his with a coworker, hers with a neighbor—that follow seem perfunctory, as if Doremus is trying to balance out things. We never actually see the early stages of these infidelities, where, presumably, the separated lovers try to resist temptation. Or maybe they don’t try. The alternative partners do seem in each case adoring, though they don’t share a taste for Paul Simon and fine whiskey. And taste is important, but, in the case of this tasteful film, isn’t always enough.

IMDB link

viewed 10/20/11 at Annenberg [Philadelphia Film Festival screening]

Going the Distance (***)

It occurred to me, watching this, how even though technologies expand possibilities, our lives expand to run up against the limits of the possible. We acquire the ability to travel in cars, then take jobs farther away, saving no time. We can meet people from across the country, then strain to be able to see them. Long-distance relationships must have existed since the first cities were built, but now they are a more common feature among those who aspire to professional lives. It therefore seems like making this the basis of a semi-serious romantic comedy should have happened before now. In movies like Sleepless in Seattle, Serendipity, and even Gone with the Wind, a couple’s physical separation helps to create the romance. It is the sense of having overcome that separation that cements the relationship. But this movie is about the more practical aspects of being together, yet not together.

Justin Long and Drew Barrymore are the happy-but-unhappy couple in this sort-of-romantic comedy pitched at the same audience as the R-rated Judd Apatow comedies. (Director Nanette Burstein moves on to features after the successful documentary American Teen.) He’s a New York-based pop-star promoter; she’s an aspiring journalist in town for a time-limited summer internship. Recognizable faces form the supporting cast. Perhaps best is Christina Applegate sister character, whose way of quieting her kids—yelling “statue!”—is pretty hilarious.

Compared to a film like Apatow’s Knocked Up, or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the humor here is less consistent, and the transitions from mildly raunchy sex comedy to kind-of-serious relationship drama are less fluid. And the film is wobbly when trying to tug the heartstrings. Barrymore may have been dating Long while filming this, but she made a better on-screen couple with her last romantic-comedy partner, Hugh Grant, whose Music and Lyrics character was also in the pop-music business. On the other hand, I did like the way these two meet—she curses him out for making her mess up as she tries to get a high score on an old Centipede video game. This is emblematic of Burstein’s approach, which also balances the male and female views more evenly than Apatow and company.

So, rather than a romantic comedy, this is really about the limits of romance, even with text messaging, Skype chats, and other bits of e-modernity Burstein deftly works into the film. I genuinely wasn’t sure how the story would end. In reality, absence does not tend to make the heart grow fonder. The difficulty of retaining a bond over time and distance more often destroys than cements a relationship. Separation prevents establishing a life together. In depicting that, this movie is welcome.

IMDB link

viewed 8/9/10 at Ritz Five (PFS screening) and reviewed 8/11 and 9/3/10