Like Crazy

I’m not sure what keeps attracting me to soft-spoken indie romances: muted sunlight captured on lovers’ faces; stilted, enormously frustrating, mumbly dialogues; soundtracks that reveal themselves as either dismissable or obsession-worthy after just two tracks. Like Crazy, from Director Drake Doremus (director of 2010’s delightfully titled Douchebag), has all of these qualities—with the added bonus of slightly more consequential student visa problems—and remains an incohesive, bubbly aura of twenty-somethings suspended and confused within the real world.

Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones) are, initially, two college students at an ambiguous design- or pre-professional college in L.A. (he’s a budding furniture designer; she’s interested in journalism). Although Jacob—ambling, untethered and baby-voiced—is American, Anna hails from a jovial, tight-knit British family. The two meet in class; scenes from their relationship immediately follow, represented in brief sketches of the two gallivanting through Californian amusement parks and beaches and indulging in their mutual love of Paul Simon’s Graceland. I-love-yous are eventually exchanged. Though quick and not-quite-dirty, their relationship feels cute and careful, like a baby giraffe stumbling onto its feet under the protective gaze of its mother.

All falls to pieces (which the characters, and film, attempt to reassemble repeatedly) when Anna’s decision to overstay her visa sits the lovers down on different continents, she in the minimalist wooden chair Jacob gives her that is inscribed, inexplicably, with the phrase “Like Crazy,” and he in a barren “I’m an artist” warehouse with his new girlfriend, Sam (Jennifer Lawrence). What follows is a series of texts (on devices that evolve from flips to iPhones, supposedly indicating temporal change even though both characters still look 18), continent-hops and failed attempts to remain in the same city for more than a few months. As their relationship unravels and comes together again for the umpteenth time, it feels a little sad, but mostly inconsequential: #firstworldproblems. Everything seems half-assed; both Anna and Jacob push on unconvincingly in pseudo-artistic pursuits that lost my interest not quickly, but gradually and painfully. Eventually, I erased my serious-movie-watching face to concede, along with the two women sitting in front of me, that observing Jacob sketch the same chair over the course of 90 minutes isn’t symbolic or artsy as much as it is laughable.

The entire theater seemed to agree by the end of the film. Jacob and Anna’s stupid arguments became comedic objects; overextended shots of their faces weren’t meaningful but rather the opposite. And as the film ended, the ambiguity of their relationship—which Doremus clearly tried to dilute through the implications of a couple showering together—felt stifling andpassionless. Though I started to remark to my friend that the film “was kind of nice,” I self-corrected: “I found that boring and hard to care about.” Like crazy.