I borrowed a movie from the library last week called Like Crazy. It's about a young couple who fall madly in love during their final year of college and then through various circumstances have to either end their relationship or attempt to stay connected from a very long distance. I brought the movie home and warned my husband that I didn't know if it was a happy or sad ending (he much prefers the former), it was an indie darling and looked interesting. Forewarned and curious we began our movie.
Stop now if you want to see the movie without me spoiling the ending, though I don't think it's worth your time, and I'll tell you why. These people are idiots. What happens in the movie is like a guide book for how to kill a relationship. And I was appalled. By the end we wished for the sad ending we had feared. Instead we were left with depressing apathy.
This young couple love each other "like crazy". Get It? Catchy title.
They meet in college, have a very talky first date and then travel through a falling-in-love montage. They graduate and it is time for the girl to go back to England because her Visa is about to expire. She decides to ignore it and stays through the summer so they can sleep in every morning and not have to suffer a few months apart. Bad idea.
Rule #1: Don't mess with the INS.
So, she goes home at the end of the summer and attempts to come back a week later as a "tourist". As she tries to enter the U.S. through customs, they stop her and tell her she's not aloud back in because she violated her Visa. Duh. Didn't her dad say this would happen? I know, you make bad decisions when you're young and in love.
Tearful airport scene and then attempts at getting new Visa fail. Girl gets job in London and begins her life without the boy. Boy starts his business in California, where a very sultry Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) happens to be his assistant.
He hops the pond to visit the love of his life, but realizes that her life is now, like England, foreign to him. They try staying connected on the phone, but the time difference is too much to handle. So, obviously, they sleep with other people. She has a conveniently attractive neighbor and little Katniss is clearly falling for our boy.
Then, they decide to get married because they can't be apart any longer. Wouldn't this have been a good option a few years ago? But, they still can't get past the Visa problem. He goes back home and immediately starts sleeping with Katniss, while the girl invites cute neighbor over to keep her depression at bay. The smitten neighbor proposes on the same night she finds out that her Visa has finally cleared.
Hooray! She can finally be with the man she loves! Who is also now her husband.
Oh, wait, they've both been living and sleeping with other people.
Oh well, they're married now, they must be together.
They greet each other cordially at the airport and then he brings her to his ramshackle loft. You can see it on her face, "I left a great job and lovely flat in London for this?" She says she's going to take a shower. After a long pause he says he'll join her. They awkwardly shower together while thinking about how they used to be all crazy in love and then the movie ends.
Seriously?
A different movie that I would recommend is called Dan in Real Life and has one of my all-time favorite lines in it. After Dan kicks out his daughter's teenage boyfriend (of 3 days), she runs after the car crying and screaming and clawing at the window and then turning to Dan (played beautifully by Steve Carrell) and screams as only a broken-hearted teenage girl can, "You are a murderer of love!"
Steve Carrell may have broken his daughter's heart, but these two characters in Like Crazy are the true murderers of love. On the back cover of the DVD it said that the movie was about the "intensity and fragility of love." I personally don't think love is fragile. I think it is the most powerful force in the universe, but we have gotten so careless with it that we kill it dead a good portion of the time.
I kept asking my husband what was wrong with these people? Who, when madly in love with one person, lives and sleeps with another? Did they really think they could go back to each other like nothing happened? Is that really how our culture thinks? I'm sorry, but that is ludicrous.
Love is priceless. A treasure. A miracle. When you find it you nurture it with kindness, you wait patiently for it to mature. You sacrifice your own comfort for it. And then you never let it go.
I have to admit that the acting in the movie was good enough that I was screaming at the tv as though these were real people. But the only thing crazy about their love was how they squandered it.
