In Romeo and Juliet, the titular lovers are threatened by a deep animosity between rival families. In Like Crazy, lovers Jacob and Anna’s relationship is threatened by immigration officers, as rising stars Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones play a young couple struggling with the strife of a long-distance relationship.
Drawing on themes of angst-ridden separation and the bureaucratic red-tape of immigration policy, Anna and Jacob are split up when Anna, unable to renew her visa, is forced back to London. By documenting the growing tension between the two with a shaky hand-held camera, Like Crazy explores a conflict that becomes progressively less believable as the plot develops, and the result is a poor display of the passion and pain of love.
Beginning with Jacob and Anna as college students in Los Angeles, the film opens with a typical classroom scene. Meaningful looks are exchanged. The next thing we know, the two are sharing coffee and getting along famously, bonding over their shared appreciation for Paul Simon’s Graceland. In a montage of sweetly realized scenes devoid of dialogue, their relationship inevitably deepens. Here, the film shows its strength with cinematographic flourishes like focusing on meaningful details in a scene—when the couple sit on Santa Monica Beach, for example, the camera closes in on their sandy feet.
It is artistic touches like these that wordlessly yet successfully convey the intimate, emotional atmosphere in any given scene. On the opposite side of the spectrum, many scenes are shot in a voyeuristic style—the viewer sees the couple around a door frame or lamppost—that effectively make up the second half of what director Drake Doremus calls “the balance between intimacy and voyeurism.”
The first hint of trouble in this blissful time comes when Jacob asks, “What are we going to do after we graduate?” Choosing to avoid reality rather than face it, Anna naively advises not to ponder this question. When the dreaded time actually arrives, Anna chooses to stay in L.A. with Jacob and “spend the whole summer in bed” (a rapid-fire montage of the couple sleeping proves, she really wasn’t kidding). She finally has to leave for the U.K., but tragedy strikes when she tries to return to the States. That monster of bureaucracy, the customs officer, refuses to let her in.
What follows is the development of an increasing separation—both physically and emotionally—as Jacob and Anna are divided by half a world of pesky geography. Jacob starts a furniture company (he has a particular fondness for chairs) and begins a half-hearted yet convenient relationship with a woman played by Jennifer Lawrence. Meanwhile, Anna begins to blog for a London-based magazine. The couple’s relationship becomes defined by phone calls that are increasingly few and reserved.
Events take a briefly positive turn when Jacob visits Anna in London, but the reunion quickly turns sour when it becomes evident that the distance between them was more than physical. Jacob’s visit ends, and the couple’s lives continue without each other.
The game changes when Anna reaches her breaking point and convinces Jacob to get married in order to resolve visa issues. Married life is no fairytale ending, however. Another six months of forced separation leaves the couple resorting to infidelity. When they are finally reunited, there is palpable tension as they adapt to their new lives together.
After much brouhaha, the ban on Anna’s visa is finally lifted and she goes back to L.A. with Jacob, but their relationship has clearly lost the supposed passion that it began with. In a frustrating lack of closure, the ending does little more than imply continued tension. What is clear is that the naïve craziness of love has faded in a film that fails to portray the ardor it advertises.
The dialogue between Jacob and Anna is a particularly weak point, as it allows for excessive improvisation from young actors without the skills to pull it off. Though their relationship is in no way defined by communication, their dialogue (when it does happen) is so bland that it fails to convey the supposed complexity of their love. Though Doremus does his best to explore the “grey areas” of modern love in these nuanced exchanges, the passion gets lost in the shuffle. In the end, the convoluted plot is just, for lack of a better word, a little too crazy to create the visceral moments it strives for.
