The Razor's Edge (1946)

The Razor's Edge (Edmund Goulding, 1946) "The Razor's Edge" is a favorite book of mine, one I was inspired to read after a disappointing film adaptation, starring Bill Murray, who stood out from an otherwise respectful version like a howling sore thumb.  But, it had been filmed before, in 1946, under the tutelage of producer Darryl F. Zanuck and directed by Edmund Goulding, only two years after the novel's first publication.

W. Somerset Maugham's book documents (in absentia) the travels of Larry Darrell (played in 1946 by Tyrone Power), who returns from pilot duties during World War I,* deeply affected by the death and devastation he's seen, and takes a period of time to "find himself"—a lot of time.  This seems odd to his high society friends, especially the family of his fiancee, Isabel (Gene Tierney), who can't seem to understand why Larry won't settle down, put his nose to the grindstone and make sure that she gets to live in the manner she's accustomed to.  Larry travels to Paris, ostensibly under the supervision of Isabel's prissy Uncle Elliott (Clifton Webb) (who does NOT approve), but Larry would rather live the life of a bohemian, working menial jobs.  After a year's separation, Isabel comes to visit and is appalled by Larry's simple living conditions.  She breaks off the engagement after taking one last attempt to seduce Larry back to her way of thinking, then returns to Chicago, where she marries Larry's millionaire friend.

Larry continues his life in Paris, still searching for answers.  Eventually, he makes a pilgrimage to India,** where, after studying and living a monk's existence in the Himalayas, he achieves a measure of happiness, finds his answers and returns to Paris to find that Isabel and her husband have lost everything in the 1929 crash, and are now living off her Uncle's charity.  His old friends have all suffered various tragedies and are at a loss how to cope...and Isabel still loves him, complicating everyone's lives.

The Goulding version hews fairly close to the book, smoothing the rough edges that might have ruffled the feathers of the Hays Office, and implying what could not be said in Maugham's book—Uncle Elliott's gay, Isabel is a too-willing adulteress, and their mutual friend Sophie (Anne Baxter), who suffers her own tragedies, has turned to drink and prostitution.  Larry would seem to be the answer to everyone's problems, but he knows that the problem lies in living in a material world and the cheapening of human life to get ahead.  And the 1946 version also includes one character that the '84 version excluded—the author (played by Herbert Marshall).  Maugham wrote "The Razor's Edge" as a roman a clef, an observance as he made his way between world wars through society as a successful author, settling in Paris and the Riviera.  The post-war version relies a bit too heavily on him, while the John Byrum version with Murray manages to make due without.  The author becomes a sounding board in the book and first film, revealing characters' innermost thoughts—a little too forthcoming, actually (one should never get too cozy with an author)—and revealing a little too much about what they're feeling.

Power is a good Larry, but not a great one (whereas Bill Murray could have been great, if his propensity for ad-libbing goofily hadn't gotten the better of him).  It's a little too hard to distinguish just what about him changes from "troubled" to "enlightened," other than a little too much intensity in the eyes.  Not the greatest of emoters, his war-weary Larry seems merely peeved and a shade brittle, but his post-pilgrimage Larry seems not so enlightened as slightly moony when reflective and somewhat superior and self-satisfied when things go his way.  Gene Tierney's Isabel seems far more shallow than the actress is capable of and when she turns vindictive, its done with a raising of the eyebrows and a haughty air—it's more a pose than a performance (as opposed to Catherine Hicks who wasn't afraid to make Isabel conspiratorial.  Clifton Webb has as much fun with Templeton as Denholm Elliott did (a role John Gielgud coveted), and Anne Baxter has some very good moments as Sophie, although her theatricality gets the better of her in the more demonstrative scenes (it did win her an Oscar, though), but she doesn't hold a candle to Theresa Russell's "fragility with a spine" Sophie.

One comes away with no definitive screen-version of "The Razor's Edge:" you'd like to take the supporting cast of the 80's version, find a new Larry and keep the later's travel footage as a replacement for the pristine (and wholly set-bound) ashram from the '46 version (were they trying to evoke Shangri-La from Lost Horizon?  Why does it look like a Hollywood hotel lobby designed by Frank Lloyd Wright?).  The dissatisfaction is high with both, with flaws impossible to overlook, but there is a great movie in there somewhere, and each film supplies some answers to what that might be like. 

The pilgrimage continues. 

* In the Murray version, he was an ambulance driver.

** In the the latter version, he goes to Tibet.

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff (Craig McCall, 2010) I love films about cinematography and there are damned few of them; I tend to come away with a new appreciation of light and vision, and the world looks fresh and new, bright and awash with color.  It happens so rarely when I watch films that the world seems different—the films of Orson Welles or Nicholas Roeg do that to me...and films about cinematography.*

When I saw Cameraman... pop up on the Netflix queue, I jabbed the Play button immediately.  The work of Jack Cardiff (the subject of the film) spanned a career of 70 years and the palettes of black and white through to color and technicolor—there's a difference—(and from the silver screen to the painter's canvas, sometimes employing both).  A cinematographer for much of his career, he also directed in the 60's and 70's and returned to cinematography later.  But he worked with the camera from the era of Things to Come to photographing Rambo: First Blood Part II, and worked with directors as diverse as Michael Powell, Laurence Olivier, Alfred Hitchcock, Henry Hathaway, John Houston, the Boulting Brothers, William Knightley, Richard Fleischer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, King Vidor, Mike Newell, John Irvin and Joshua Logan.  Cardiff raised the level of everything he worked on and directors knew he had the eye of a painter and the craftsmanship of an engineer.  He was truly a renaissance man.

Documentarian Craig McCall shows it all and knows how to get great quotes from the man and anecdotes about the various personalities he worked with, the directors he worked for and the subjects he photographed, literally a man in the middle who knew how to make both sides look their best.  Some of the surviving directors give testimony, as well as Martin Scorsese, Powell's editor-wife Thelma Schoonmaker, Lauren Bacall, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas (a rare post-stroke interview), John Mills, as well as Moira Shearer, Kim Hunter and Kathleen Byron.

In showing the history of this one man, it is also a fascinating overview of the entire art and history of the cinema as well, and how the well-composed image is as timeless as beauty itself. This is gorgeous to look at, and very educational and highly, highly recommended.

* One of my favorites is Visions of Light, which was produced with the ASC Union and has a broad spectrum of subject matter and timeline, as does Camerman.  You can't do a film about lighting movies without mentioning Dietrich, and I'll always remember that 45 degree angle trick.

Don't Make a Scene: Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

The Story: Stanley Kubrick's nightmare comedy about the checks and balances of the American-Russian nuclear stalemate coming undone provided many opportunities for the display of Official Absurdity, and the way that things can go wrong at the worst times. The President's hot-line call to the Russia President is the most sustained of these and quite a solo act for Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley, a well-meaning Adlai Stevenson-like egghead. As with so much of the movie, the comedy comes from everything conspiring to make the situation worse from faulty phone-lines to the peccadilloes of those in power. And in the style of then-up-and-coming comic Bob Newhart, the heart of the comedy comes from only getting one side of the conversation. It is enhanced that the clock is ticking on mutual annihlation, and yet, protocol must be met, niceties offered...and awkwardness inevitable. Tick. Tick. Tick.

The Set-up: An Air Force general has gone nuts and sent a squadron of B-52's to drop their nuclear payload on Soviet Russia. With time a critical factor, and recalling the planes an impossibility, the American President calls his Russian counter-part to inform him of the news from the War Room of the Pentagon, while Joint Chiefs (including the hawkish General "Buck" Turgidson--played by George C. Scott) and the Russian Ambassador DeSadesky (Peter Bull) listen in.

Action!


Ambassador DeSadesky: I've done as you ask. Be careful, Mr. President. I think he is drunk.

President Merkin Muffley: Hello, Dimitri?

Muffley: Listen, I can't hear you too well. Do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little? Oh, that's much better. Yes, fine. I can hear you now, Dimitri, clear and plain and coming through fine. I'm coming through fine, too, eh? Good, then. Well, then, as you say, we're both coming through fine. Good.

Muffley: Well, it's good that you're fine and I'm fine. I agree with you, it's great to be fine. Ha ha ha ha.

Muffley: Now, then, Dimitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb.

Muffley: ...The Bomb, Dimitri. The Hy-drogen Bomb. Well, now what happened is, um, one of our base commanders, he had a sort of...

Muffley: ...we-ell, he went a little funny in the head. You know, just a little...funny...

Muffley: And he went and he did a silly thing. Well, I'll tell you what he did: He ordered our planes....to attack your country. N'--

Muffley: ...well, let me finish, Dimitri. Let me finish, Dimitri.

Muffley: Well, listen, how do you think I feel about it? Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dimitri? Why do you think I'm calling you, just to say "Hello?"

Muffley: Of course, I like to speak with you! Of course, I like to say "Hello!" Not now, but anytime, Dimitri!

Muffley: I'm just calling to tell you something terrible has happened....It's a friendly call, of course, it's a friendly call. Listen, if it wasn't friendly...you probably wouldn't have even got it!

Muffley: They will not reach their targets for at least another hour. I am...I am positive, Dimitri. Listen, I've been all over this with your anbassador, it is not a trick! Well, I'll tell you...we'd like to give your air staff a complete rundown of the targets the flight plans and the defensive systems of the planes. Yes! I mean if-if-if we're unable to recall the planes I'd say that, uh...well, uh...We're just gonna have to help you destroy them.

Muffley: I know they're our boys. Alright, well, listen now, who should we call? Who should we call, Dimitri? Wha..? The People...sorry, you faded away there.

Muffley: The People's Central Air Defense Headquarters. Where is that, Dimitri? In Omsk. Right? Yes? Oh, you'll call them first, will you? Uh-huh. Listen, do you happen to have the phone number on you, Dimitri? We..What? I see, just ask for Omsk Information. Ah.

Muffley: I'm sorry too, Dimitri. I'm very sorry. Alright, you're sorrier than I am, but I'm sorry as well! I'm as sorry as you are, Dimitri.

Muffley: Don't say you're more sorry than I am, because I'm capable of being just as sorry as you are. So, we're both sorry, alright? Alright!


Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Words by: Peter George, Terry Southern ,Stanley Kubrick, and Peter Sellers

Pictures by: Gilbert Taylor and Stanley Kubrick

Dr. Strangelove is available on Sony/Columbia DVD.

We'll meet again.

Shamelessly Stealing from "Scanners" (Again!): The Sequel

Yesterday, we posted the first part of Matthias Stork's video essay on what he has termed "Chaos Cinema."

This is part two, and where I could semi-agree with Stork (and appreciate what he was saying) in the first part, here is where his thesis breaks down (and it's partially his chosen examples and partially his myopic view of what makes good film).  He does himself no favors by choosing for his musical examples a comparison of Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh" sequence from Singing in the Rain (all done in one shot, full figure—the pressure of completing the scene on the performer, while the filmic presentation is rather artless, moving the camera in to catch expressions, and tracking to follow the action (the bare minimum of competency)—and clips from Moulin Rouge! and Chicago, which use intense editing and a limited mise-en scene to focus the viewers' attention.  Some of this is practical—Catherine Zeta-Jones is no Donald O'Connor and—Oscar or no—the editing helps and intensifies the performance (and probably excises mis-steps and compiles the "best" takes (you know, the way editing does in its most basic form), but also builds the intensity of the scene. Moulin Rouge! is one of the best examples of music-intensifying editing, and is somewhat necessary in some sequences because the songs are mash-ups—audio montages of several songs slammed together.  To do it any other way, without transitions from song-cluster to song-cluster, I think would be jarring, maybe more jarring than what is already on the screen.  It also projects the wild intensity of the night-club setting, especially in the sequence Stork includes that pits performers against audience.  Baz Luhrmann and his editor Jill Bilcock build the conflict (I imagine this like the "Tonight Quintet and Chorus" from West Side Story where five points of view are joined in one song from different locations, and where cuts are made—in the film—to locate the groups and induividuals singing their parts) and the intensity and sets up the tension between performer and audience, making it seem manically dangerous.  When emotion and music and dancing is what's most important, who gives a rat's ass for "spatial integrity?" (ESPECIALLY when what you're viewing is a BARE stage).  It is film, after all—not theater.

Also, his closing narration could have been just as effective over the featured sequence of The Hurt Locker to illustrate his point.  The fact that The Hurt Locker is a great film and Unstoppable merely an entertaining (if lunk-headed) one, just goes back to what I said yesterday...it's not the technique that's bad or the audiences' short attention spans...it's the bad directors who don't know how to use them to communicate information.  And create art.

He shoulda stuck with Part 1.

Shamelessly Stealing from "Scanners" (Again!)

Once again, we are shamelessly swiping content from Jim Emerson's "Scanners" blog (just because this video is so good). It's a video essay from Matthias Stork on the current state of editing in films, a by-product of the current crop of directors being from such schools as stuntmen, music-video production and commercials. His points are sound in this one* (although the second part I find incredibly flawed and the sources he sights for more formalistic film-making—specifically musicals and silent films—completely overlook the concept of montage and beat-cutting), although he paints with a very wide brush.

What is fascinating to me is the importance he puts on the soundtrack of sound design and effects to provide the continuity that the uncohesive visuals don't provide. I do sound for picture, and I remember once working on a commercial done in the "NYPD Blue" kind of caffeinated "searching" camera style where I inserted the sound of a hug, where none occurred in the picture (I remember that it featured Peter Jacobson, who's now a regular on "House"), but it was EXPECTED to be there, so we put it in, even though it violated the rule of "You See it-You Hear it = It must be Real."  In this case, if you hear it, it must have happened, even if you never see it happening.

The SFX tracks are so full now, what with digital effects and digital editing that you can fill the soundtrack up with all sorts of noise, rather than the old school simplified work of the mechanical era where the sound editors and foley artists' purpose was to focus the attention on what is important (and eliminate the superfluous). In a sense, sound has replaced picture for verisimilitude, and picture and montage is all illusion (like CGI and green-screen and simulated fight-scenes)—all you need is a suggestion of something happening, rather than any "real" "money shot." These sequences are all children of the shower murder from Psycho, where we see somebody being stabbed (and hear the cuts) even though NOT ONCE do we see the knife touching the body. Is this, then, also "Chaos Cinema?"

It is—it must be—and yet Stork, judging from his conclusions in Part 2 (which—sigh—I'll probably have to put up tomorrow), would probably be compelled to deny it (as to criticize Psycho would be...well, it would be frowned upon in critical circles and academia), as he praises the "Chaos" technique of Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker.   The point is that this technique is a tool for communication.  It can be used badly—and has been in all sorts of action films.  But it is because the directors themselves are bad communicators and lousy story-tellers.  It's not the technique that's bad.  The techniques are used to communicate and evoke emotion, rather than provide a map of what's happening where and to whom—you don't need it with the shower scene from Psycho (as much you would, say, the gun battle in High Noon) as that shower is a very small space, but Hitchcock's many perspectives and rapid cuts are designed to extend a short murder into a longer sequence and impart appropriate terror to the audience...at that particular point in time (a later murder will be basically done in one..uh...cut).

It is chaos and manipulation, done by a master of film-art, using his craft to disorient his viewers in a shocking development and communicating the character's terror to a sympathetic audience who has been following that character from the beginning of the movie.

It is chaos, yes.  But, it is brilliant.


* Even so, his choice of the John Woo scene works...until the edits occur, and then the film is just as susceptible to chaos jumble as the ones he condemns.  At some point, the perspective gets lost...as does his point.   One suspects that Stork's favorite film might be Hitchcock's Rope.

Time Bandits

Time Bandits (Terry Gilliam, 1981) As a filmmaker, Terry Gilliam grew up on Time Bandits, while still maintaining the childish sense of fun and menace that permeated his work before and during the Monty Python days.  It's a work of pure imagination, a circus-y freak show that just might kill you, where time is the scene of the crime, and even God and Satan are susceptible to the charms of a precocious little boy and a voracious team of avaricious little people.  One's tempted to say it's Gilliam's version of "Snow White" or a flipped version of "The Wizard of Oz," but that would be taking the piss and anarchy out of it.

11 year old Kevin (Craig Warnock) is fascinated with Ancient Greece, which some parents might find a sign of a curious intellect but inspires nothing but neglect in his parents.  One night, the wardrobe in his bedroom is shattered by a horse-bound knight who bursts through it and gallops down a forest road that has suddenly appeared—clearly something is amiss in the space-time continuum!  The next night, Kevin wants to go to bed early, but instead of a knight-errant, he's visited by a crush of six thieving "little people." They're demoted employees of The Supreme Being (voiced by Tony Jay, but will appear later as a doddering Ralph Richardson)—seems their previous job of designing trees and bushes was sub-par and they're now tasked with fixing rends in the fabric of space-time.  But, being particularly (how should we say?) "entrepreneurial" they've seen that their map of black holes can take them to other Earth-eras, from which they can pillage whatever they can carry in a necessarily brief time.  "Necessarily" because they're being pursued by extremes of Good and Evil (aren't we all?), with TSB wanting his map back and the personification of Evil (David Warner, clearly relishing the role) coveting the map, so that he can fix TSB's mistakes and make the Universe more to his liking.

Gilliam's film then hops and darts and falls into an episodic structure, where the diminutive fugitives "crash" various eras, including Sherwood Forest in the era of Robin Hood (John Cleese, doing a hilarious version of Prince Charles), a campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte's (a nearly incomprehensible Ian Holm), who is obsessed with puppet shows (because they're smaller than him), the HMS Titanic (served "neat"), and, to Kevin's delight, Ancient Greece, where he befriends King Agamemnon (Sean Connery*), who is first seen battling a Minotaur. 

Most of it works and works hilariously, even when Gilliam veers into the surreal...and the budgetarily spare.  Still, the low-tech miracles Guillam pulls off with limited resources (5 mil' financed by George Harrison's Handmade Films) are awe-inspiring, not only for their realization on film, but also for the sheer visual splendor—and squalor—Gilliam's considerable imagination envisioned (and still does).  It's an amazing spectacle, and if the film stutters a bit pace-wise (especially during the Napoleon segment), the delights to the eye tend to gloss over any story-telling problems.  Gilliam's eye would become bolder and his subject matter richer, but Time Bandits was the transition-point between a sketch-comedian/animator and a true film-maker and visionary.



What all the fuss is about



* The script read: "The warrior took off his helmet, revealing someone that looks exactly like Sean Connery, or an actor of equal but cheaper stature." Gilliam was shocked that not only had Connery read the script, he wanted the part, and even suggested a disconcerting cameo at the end.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (Martin Ritt, 1965) With the antcipation of the Christmas release of a film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, it would do well to revisit the world of George Smiley, "Control," and the duplicity of John le Carré's "kitchen-sink" version of spies.  They're background characters in The Spy..., the focus being operative Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) former head of the West Berlin branch of "The Circus," who must go behind enemy lines—one of the toughest of them, the Berlin Wall—as a potential "mole"* to ferret out who might be a double agent for the Soviets, responsible for the death of one of Leamas' agents.

His identity is kept the same—The Circus wants Leamas and his background history out in the open—but he is demoted in rank and stature, and, depressed and drinking heavily, he becomes bait for Soviet recruitment to betray information.  That's the mission, become a decoy on the "inside," another "double" feeding the Soviets false information, while trying to find out if there's a player on the other side in The Circus feeding information to the Russians.** 

Oh, what a tangled web the Cold War weaves.

Taken to East Berlin, Leamas is interrogated by a suspicious Russian administrator named Fiedler (Oskar Werner) who (rightly) suspects Leamas of being a "plant."  Fiedler suspects a British "mole" already underground in the Soviet service and so sweats Leamas for any information to discover who that might be.  Ultimately, Leamas is undone by what so many of LeCarre's heroes or anti-heroes are susceptible to, the warmth of human contact—a failing that trips up a lot of the author's protagonists.  Leamas "comes out of the cold," the world of spies, and his friends, relations or lovers—the thread of decency and honesty they provide—are used against him.

For the fact of the matter is the Spymasters of "The Circus" are cold-hearted bastards ("without sympathy" as "Control," played by Cyril Cusack, ponders)—they have to be to combat their enemies—and they're just as capable of betraying their own as those they fight. 

Case in point: George Smiley (played here by Rupert Davies).  He would become le Carré's most celebrated character, but here he's a bit of a functionary, and he's just as cold-hearted as the rest.  In the "Tinker, Tailor..." timeline, "Control" was long since dead, having been driven out by "the new broom" from his station, which had left him suspicious and paranoid (ultimately with good reason) with Smiley his only trusted colleague.  When the BBC made a television mini-series of the book, Smiley was famously played by Sir Alec Guinness and (as le Carré amusingly notes in his new forward to "Tinker, Tailor...," because of that he "lost control" of the character.  But Smiley (however sympathetically Guinness played him) is also a "cold-hearted bastard"—if he wasn't, he wouldn't have lost the vital clue that was exploited by his enemies.  He gives as bad as he gets, and, even at his most triumphant, takes little joy in what he does.

In such a world, Ritt's direction is entirely appropriate—low-key, almost documentary in feel on the streets of London—in drab black-and-white, not the high-contrast color of other spy films of the era.  There is nothing glamorous about it, and plays out slowly and subtley—in fact, after a de-briefing by his boss, the shift in tone is so dreary one suspects one is watching a different film.  It is part and parcel of the subterfuge—it works on us as it does for Leamas' Sov' recruiters (most prominently Michael Hordern).

And the script, now there's an interesting tale.  A beginning draft was written by Hollywood veteran Guy Trosper, who died subsequently.  Taking over was poet-playwright Paul Dehn.  Dehn had written the final polish on the James Bond spy film Goldfinger (amusingly, as the two film could not be more polar opposite), and was the mainstay-writer for the "Planet of the Apes" sequels.  But, Dehn knew the world of spies well—during the second World War, Major Paul Dehn was the "Political Warfare" officer at the BSC training headquarters "Camp X" (where among the trainees were Roald Dahl and Bond creator Ian Fleming).***  Dehn was well-versed in spycraft, deceit, and keeping secrets and his distillation of le Carré's novel brings the moral duplicity to the fore, while keeping the audience guessing on whose side is whom.

If the film has one flaw, it is the casting of Burton as Leamas.  Burton was too good, too charismatic an actor/star to play a functionary like Leamas (it's about the same as "buying" Sean Connery as a spy (which was part of the joke of the Bond series)—he's someone you'd notice walking into a room, and thus, hardly spy material.  But, Burton's presence, no doubt, got the film made, so the point is a bit moot.  Still, if its ideas and mysteries of the State and the heart you want more than action and fireballs (shall we say if you want to be "stirred and not shaken?"), The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is a fine, bracing tonic.



Davies as George Smiley in The Spy...



...and Guinness in the BBC-TV Tinker, Tailor...





Gary Oldman: "this year's" Smiley



* The term "mole" is a le Carré invention—his spy-circles code-name for a double agent hiding in plain sight within one of the other spy agencies, Soviet or british, and relaying information to "the other side."

** There has been a rich history of double agents throughout the annals of spydom, the most significant of which were "The Cambridge Five"—Kim Philby, Donald Duart Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and a fifth (and possibly more)—who'd been recruited during their college years, passed information to the Russians during WWII, and subsequently during the post-War years through the early 1950's.  "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (and the other two of the le Carré "Karla" novels) and le Carré's subsequent "A Perfect Spy" are inspired by "The Five" and their Russian puppet-master.

*** And, interestingly, one of the people who asked, and was briefly considered, to run Camp X...was Kim Philby!

Crazy, Stupid, Love

"Love Sucks (A Cautionary Tale)"
or
"It Takes a Village (To Make a Divorce)"

The sad thing about romantic-comedies, circa the 21st Century, is their dependence on formula: Boy Meets Girl/Boy Loses Girl/Complications Ensue/Boy Wises Up/Happy Ending; or Girl Meets Boy/Girl Loses Boy/Girl's Self-Worth Depends on Boy/Romantic Rival Meets Terrible Demise/Happy Ending (of a sorts).  The last few I've seen of the genre have depended on hitting these plot-points, no matter what city, what occupation, or what sex the film centers around.  Even Bridesmaids, for all its wit and wildness, still ended with the assumption that everything will be alright if "the girl" gets "a man." The "by-the numbers" dance steps that most rom-coms boogie to have the ability to regress me back to the five-year old boy I was who hated "kissing scenes;" the final rosy fade-out inevitably spoils the most romantic of comedies for me, failing to warm my the cockles of my heart or make me feel all-gooey-fuzzy.  Instead, I walk away cheerlessly cynical.  Been there.  Done that.  A fish needs a bicycle.


So, it's a nice surprise, bordering on the revolutionary, when a romantic-comedy turns the formula on its ear enough that I enjoy it.  Don't get me wrong, Crazy, Stupid, Love* has a "happy ending," but there is also a nice glowing lack of resolution.  This is a movie that dares to say that Love is hard work, and, yeah, it sucks, but it could be worth it, because, like Life, it beats the alternative.

This is not where it starts, but where it starts to get interesting: Chick-magnet Jacob (Ryan Gosling,** he has a nicely subtle double-take for comedy) is in a bar in mid-closer with his latest fling when he takes the time to call over a half-stewed Cal Weaver (Steve Carell, showing exactly why he deserves to be out of TV and in films, something that doesn't happen nearly enough).  The reason?  Cal's moaning is throwing off Jacob's technique.  Cal's been doing that a lot lately (at the office he's told: "Amy heard you crying in the bathroom - we all thought it was cancer.") No, it's not cancer.  After 25 years of marriage, Cal's wife (Julianne Moore—she's great) has revealed she wants a divorce AND she's slept with another man (Kevin Bacon, he's also great).  This offends Jacob's self-absorbed sensibilities: "Seriously, I don't know whether to help you or euthanize you."

So, Jacob helps Cal to "man up"—a younger "Obi-Wan" to the elder's bowl-cut Luke with credit cards as lightsabers, and this, if not turning Cal's life around, at least making it busier.  And complicated.

Running parallel to the story is Hannah's (Emma Stone, big-eyed waif) relationship problems ("You're life is so PG-13!" says her token-Asian friend, Liz).  That's because she wants to be engaged to office co-worker Richard (Josh Groban—rather risky of him to look so bad in this movie) and is focused on that, so much so that she plays ignorant to Jacob's innuendos when he approaches her while trolling in a bar.

And, at this point, to say anything more would be saying too much, spoiling the fun and sending the whole Jenga-construction of the film crashing to the rec-room floor (In fact, I've probably said too much already).  Just when you think everything is going as smooth as satin sheets, the film-makers throw you an extra wrinkle, and it's been a log, long while since a rom-com has done that.  The dialogue is fresh though the situations seem familiar—everyone's conceptions of Love and Romance seem to be based on The Movies and directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa *** and writer Dan Fogelman **** are only too happy to skewer them, while paying some respect—the complications teetering on the sit-comish, then resolving with the most graceless of dismounts.  Applaud anyway because if they're not the best of executions (the performances help here), there are extra points for "artistic" and "difficulty."

Adding to the fray are the effects all this confusion have on "the kids" (Jonah Bobo, Joey King) and the friends (John Carroll Lynch—he's becoming one of my favorite character actors—and Analeigh Tipton).  It, after all, takes a village to make a divorce...very uncomfortable.  And special mention should be made to the movies' best utility player, Marisa Tomei, who surprises with just about every performance these days (Okay, okay, Marisa, you DESERVED that Oscar, okay?).

Highly enjoyable.  Bravo.

Stupid, Crazy, Love is a Full-Price Ticket.

* Yes, it has the superfluous comma, you English Majors, but if you see the title as a list rather than "adverb, adjective, subject," it makes a bit of sense, and the film actually earns the charity for considering the possibility. 

** Gosling is an odd bird.  It's taken awhile for me to warm to him (I'm one of the few people to have seen his awful work in Fracture, but he has a nice laid-back dead-pan style of comedy—as displayed in Lars and the Real Girl—that hews closely to his dramatic work.  Just a nudge, either way determines comedy or tragedy.  He's dangerously good.

*** Okay, this is scary, but hear me out: Ficarra and Requa have written such films as the remake of Bad News Bears, Cats & Dogs, Bad Santa (a bit raw, but actually rather sweet) and...wrote and directed the little seen gay romance, I Love You Phillip Morris—as subversive and weirdly sweet movies to be seen in a long time.  Forgive the early credits—these guys are good.

**** Okay, now REALLY hear me out: Fogelman wrote the screenplay for Cars and the screen-story for Cars 2, wrote Fred Claus...but did fine work on both Bolt and Tangled for Disney.  Seems he can write for real people, too, and not just 'toons.