Last year’s “Blue Valentine,” starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, told this same kind of story through a flashback-heavy narrative: Girl and guy fall in love, various things — jobs, life, trust and the lack of it — brutally push them apart in the next few years. The result was a scathingly honest film that seemed to encourage us to fall in love while also warning us, in a quite raw way, about all the bad stuff that can come of it. In the same vein (but less painfully) goes “Like Crazy,” which dials down the cruelty of “Blue Valentine” but shares a similar hopefulness and hopelessness. Sometimes love works and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we should have gone for it and sometimes we shouldn’t. It’s all risk, and with every risk comes the possibility of failure and of loss.
Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones) fall in love quite idyllically while attending college in Los Angeles; she’s a British foreign exchange student studying journalism and media and he’s a furniture design student. They feel each other out over an awkward first coffee date, and then they listen to Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” and then the romance is on with whiskey tastings and go-kart competitions and visits to the beach. As their relationship grows more engrossing and more intense — and as their graduation date approaches — Jacob makes Anna a chair with the inscription “like crazy,” a physical manifestation of their loving each other “like crazy.” It’s all very sweet and adorable. And then it all goes to crap.
Anna, you see, decides not to return to England after graduating, instead overstaying her student visa for a few months to hang out more with Jacob. And that one decision ends up reverberating quite painfully through their lives, getting her detained when she tries to return to the U.S. again and painfully cementing them in different countries. To be together, Jacob has to visit England, since Anna can’t come back to Los Angeles. They suffer through untimely phone calls and trying to make the best of it. But soon there are jobs involved (she with a magazine, him with his own furniture studio) and other people (Anna’s flirtation with a neighbor, Jacob’s growing affection in employee Sam, played by Jennifer Lawrence) and what began as this great, riveting love story for Anna and Jacob becomes something else. Something warped, and sometimes dishonest, and sometimes passionate, and altogether different from what either of them ever expected — especially when they decide whether to end their relationship or keep it going.
Director Drake Doremus allowed for most of the film’s dialogue to be improvised, and the film benefits from that energetic freedom: Together Yelchin and Jones are simultaneously adorable and fearless. They’re cute in hipsters-in-love mode and terrifying when they fight, the manifestation of all our most cringe-worthy mistakes in love. It’s simple stuff — petty jealousies, missed opportunities — but Yelchin and Jones give their characters an exuberance that then slowly goes out, a process inherently difficult to watch. The character development is sometimes uneven (we see Anna’s family but never Jacob’s, and Anna’s ability to attract all kinds of men seems a little exaggerated) but the acting — especially Yelchin’s, whose blank gazes and slow-burn temper win in every way possible — is staggeringly good regardless. These performances aren’t as visceral as Gosling and Williams were in “Blue Valentine,” but they don’t need to be — the heartache fading away into listlessness is powerful enough.
Before their relationship so fantastically begins its descent downward, Anna asks Jacob, “Who knows what we’re gonna do when we leave?” It’s the kind of question that every student has asked before graduating from any kind of academic institution and also the yearning, indefinable desire that every young relationship strives to veer away from answering. What happens when we leave the comfort of new love? What happens if it doesn’t work out? In “Like Crazy,” the result may be a smack in every Hallmark card’s face, but the film’s honesty doubles as honorable integrity. You don’t always get what you want, but with “Like Crazy,” at least you understand why you don’t.
