It starts as many great love stories do – with a letter. The girl, Anna, is a British college student studying abroad in Los Angeles. She slides the note under the windshield wiper of the car belonging to the boy, Jacob. They meet for coffee, and a beautiful, visceral romance begins. Felicity Jones plays Anna as an emotionally driven girl who impulsively overstays her study visa, the expiration of which would have pulled Anna and Jacob apart.
The director, Drake Doremus, also co-wrote the script. His unique approach to shooting films is to give the actors an outline of the story, encouraging them to improvise. The outlines also focus on subtext and scene objectives. With this in mind, “Like Crazy” seems less like a movie and more like a real love story. The actors, Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones, share an apparent onscreen chemistry that transcends scripted lines in a film. The jury at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival must have felt it, too, because Doremus went home with the Grand Jury Prize.
The first part of the film is interspersed with lovingly shot handheld sequences cut to match the pace at which Anna and Jacob fall in love, following the rhythm of the relationship. This rhythm is evoked most poignantly during one of the film’s lovely montages, wherein the pair wanders to the beach and the boardwalk, giving a vague but dramatic impression of two people who have fallen in love.
The film refuses to remain at a polite distance from Jacob and Anna; after Anna boldly makes the first move, the film dives into their relationship, depicting both the gritty details and the moments of clarity. It is the little things that make this film tick. The couple’s stolen summer is depicted in a subtle montage of sleeping positions, which looks like something out of a psychology textbook illustrating stages of sleep. Jacob makes a chair for Anna, and she gives him a notebook. He sketches bits of furniture ideas, and she writes. The chair has those titular words “like crazy” etched into the bottom of the seat, just another tiny detail that gives the film its heartfelt sincerity. The precise use of lighting is particularly effective in revealing the small moments that seem to be caught unwittingly on camera rather than intentionally shot.
Conversely, Anna and Jacob’s relationship problems are not glossed over in Hollywood fashion: their moods, occasional spats, and the all-encompassing yearning that they feel is out there on display. The film unabashedly endorses the notion that love, like anything worth pursuing, is messy and complicated. The film ends on an ambiguous note, but one nevertheless leaves the theater with a reinforced belief in the modified truism that love can conquer most obstacles – in Anna and Jacob’s case, an ocean.
The cinematography beautifully conveys a Zen-like sparseness to Jacob’s workshop and an art conveyed in Anna’s sartorial choices. The artful and loving depiction of those honest details only further bolsters a film about the often mystified power of love. It is about two people unable to be with each other, yet unable to live and love without the other.
Emily Kuhn can be reached at [email protected].
