Crazy, Stupid, Love, the superior 2011 rom-com starring Steve Carell, Julianne Moore, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, is 10 years old this year. Ten years isn’t much, right? You’ve probably got socks that are that old, or a car, maybe even some kids. But watching it again you’ll be struck by a few things. Firstly, it holds up pretty well: the jokes are still funny; the feels are still feely; Gosling’s spectacular abs are still, yes. Spectacular. Secondly, they don’t make films like Crazy, Stupid, Love anymore, and perhaps there are some good reasons for that. Thirdly, a lot can happen in a decade – particularly the one we’ve just had. Ten years, it turns out, can be a lifetime.
Written by Dan Fogelman (This is Us), Crazy, Stupid, Love started life as “Untitled Marital Crisis Comedy”, and that’s pretty much how it ended up: somewhere between the cheese of Love, Actually (2003) and the sting of The Squid and the Whale (2006; now there's a comedy about marital crisis). Carell plays Cal, an ineffectual middle-aged schlub who discovers that his wife Emily (Moore), is having an affair with a smarmy colleague (Kevin Bacon, natch) and doesn’t want to be married to him anymore. While drowning his sorrows in a cheesy backlit Noughties hell bar, Cal meets Jacob (Gosling), a sexy Mephistopheles in a three-piece suit who calls women “fancy face” and screws them with such frequency that his bed posts must present some structural concerns.
Jacob takes pity on Cal and decides to help him “rediscover” his “manhood” – whatever the hell that means then or now. In the film at least, it entails a wardrobe shakedown and a crash-course in picking up women using strategies redolent of Neil Strauss’s The Game, ie. being a bit rude, though they can also be a bit funny: when a potential conquest, played by Marisa Tomei, tells Cal she studied at Oxford he replies, “England. Yuck.” (He’s got a point.) But Jacob himself has an Achilles' heel: Hannah, a smart, beautiful, fractionally goofy junior lawyer played by Emma Stone, who won’t take his bullshit (but would, of course, be loosely reincarnated as Mia to Gosling’s Seb in La La Land in a few years’ time). So who, in a manner of speaking, will come out on top?
The premise of rich (almost exclusively white) Californians agonising about their love lives may seem rather dated now – and not just by 10 years; the film contains a set-piece showdown worthy of a Restoration comedy – but the ageing of the film has its unexpected perks. It’s hard not to give a little sigh of nostalgia at the sight of Cal and Jacob meeting outside a branch of Borders (ah, the lost hours in the magazine section!), or to cackle in horror at the fashion “upgrades” that Cal receives at Jacob’s hands (striped shirt, paisley tie, zip-neck sweater, grey suede suit jacket! All at once!). Meanwhile, Jacob sneers in disgust at Cal’s own style choices: outsized polos, billowing chinos, bulbous New Balance trainers, all of which would get today’s Gen-Zers frantically rattling their piggy banks.
Then of course there is Gosling who, despite modelling a line of deep V-neck jumpers with nothing underneath, owning an unseemly amount of cocktail paraphernalia, and spouting lines which, in today’s climate, would be deemed unforgivably dismissive of the opposite sex, was well on the upward curve towards Peak Gosling. Blue Valentine had come out the year before, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive and George Clooney’s The Ides of March were also out in 2011, and there was nothing that the sad-eyed Canadian could do that wouldn’t make us swoon, be it acting in smart and/or stylish movies or breaking up street fights in a singlet. We're pleased to report that his charming deadpan delivery has lost none of its appeal. (See also: spectacular abs.)
One of the most surprising ways in which Crazy, Stupid, Love shows its era, however, it that it occupies a middle ground that is rarely sought anymore. It's got some racy bits, and nods in the direction of risqué, but nothing too challenging or – heaven forfend! – thought-provoking. Watching it again it has a kind of mild, middle-of-the-road sass that is a strangely underrated pleasure, particularly in times that have been so all-out testing. And when Julianne Moore’s Emily sighs wistfully at Steve Carell’s Cal and tells him “It’s been a hell of a year,” you want to sigh wistfully with her and say, yes Emily, I’m sure it has. But boy, just you wait.
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Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
