Love drives us crazy; love drives us to do stupid things; but love will always triumph.
"This is cliche", remarks Steve Carell part way through the film.
Correct.
Yet again, Hollywood offers cinema audiences a film cemented on cliche. Like the best rom-coms, Crazy, Stupid, Love presents a plethora of different characters as part of an interweaving narrative. Each has their own story that collides with the others with apparently dramatic consequences. The trouble is, the characters are simply shallow stereotypes whose narrative trajectories are easily predicted from the opening credits. Nice but boring husband becomes cool womaniser; cool womaniser falls for girl who is equally "cute and sexy"; precocious children prove far more intelligent than their romantically inept parents. The result is a film that has nothing new to say and is far less clever than the scriptwriters would have you believe. By all accounts there are some highly amusing moments (the climactic scene where the plot threads suddenly unravel springs to mind), but this is predominantly down to the performances (see Marisa Tomei). Even then, they offer nothing that hasn't been seen before (see Steve Carell).
Ultimately, the film is a forgettable piece of saccharine American sentimentality. Love may conquer all, but this film fails to conquer...well...anything.
2/5
