Ryan Gosling. Photo credit: Campus Progress.
Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore and Emma Stone star in adult themed romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love, which charts the progress of a fortysomething square dad (Carell) who suddenly finds himself back in the dating game and taking lessons in love from a slick ladykiller (Gosling).
- Old-fashioned, in a good way. Peter Debruge of Variety heaped praise on “mature, grown-up” romantic comedy. “Old-fashioned as that might sound, there’s a fresh, insightful feel to this multigenerational love story,” enthused Debruge, who appreciated the “well rounded ensemble’s” “sincere, soulful” moments and complexity which means it “refuses to be reduced to a simple, one-sentence pitch.”
Gosling is “alarmingly sleek and muscular,” exclaimed Edelstein. “Impossibly ripped and tanned,” was how Debruge put it.
- Deliciously ‘bisexual.’ David Edelstein at The New York Magazine said the “movie has an unexpectedly high proportion of delights to groaners, and it’s full of actors you’ll want to see – real actors, like Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, and Emma Stone, their edges not blunted by years of making witless buddy movies and chick flicks.” Edelstein delighted in the “bisexuality” of the film – “i.e., it boasts scenes from both the male and female points of view! … Stone is amazingly vivid. She looks hungry to act and sometimes just hungry, as when she spontaneously bites Gosling’s shoulder in a wineshop. Half of the audience will moan, ‘I’d like some of that shoulder!’ while the other half yells, ‘Bite me!‘”
- Clever, maybe too clever. The Hollywood Reporter’s Kirk Honeycutt praised the “shrewdly written” and “clever” screenplay by Dan Fogelman, which pulls off “not one but two genuine surprises,” but regretted that “its cleverness, however, masks a lack of real heart.” “In its headlong pursuit of laughs, the screenplay runs by several opportunities to explore its characters in greater depth,” sniped Honeycutt.
- Main line plot is boring. Writing at The New Yorker, David Denby suggested the “main line of the story,” the relationship between the couple who are separating after 25 years of marriage, isn’t gripping enough to carry the movie: “In the remarriage classics (The Awful Truth, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday), the former partners have a way of talking and being with each other that they don’t have – and couldn’t possibly have – with anyone else. That sophisticated metaphor for sexual compatibility made for uniquely satisfying romantic comedy. But Crazy, Stupid, Love holds to the boring modern convention that good people are inarticulate, and Cal and Emily mainly stumble around trying to fill the silence.”