If you've seen the trailer for this movie, in a way you've kind of seen the whole movie (except the trailer is kind of better, what with the great music and all). Like Crazy is charming and full of angst and an overuse of montages, which of course makes it indie-film-junkie heroin. I enjoyed the film on the whole, and I grant that the two lead actors (especially Felicity Jones) compensate for a lot of plot problems with their undeniable charm and chemistry. However, they don't make up for how frustrating the very premise of this film becomes if you're like me and you start really thinking about it right there in the theater.
The biggest issue I have with it is that the entire central problem of the film arises because Jones' character Anna, makes an extremely stupid decision. If that were all I could maybe forgive it, but she knows exactly what she's doing when she does it, and is just (apparently) dumb enough to not consider the possible consequences. The basic gist is this: Anna is an immigrant from England, in Los Angeles on a student visa. Her visa expires upon her graduation, and she has to spend two months in England for the summer before she can come back to her beloved boyfriend of one year, Jacob. As anyone who's ever dealt with a visa or even looked into it, you know that these deadlines are not by any means flexible, and the consequences of violating a visa deadline are extremely severe (I'm also certain they impress this upon you many, many times in the application process). Anna, however, decides even after she and Jacob have accepted this necessary two-month hiatus that she'll just stay in the States through the summer. Who's going to notice, right? Wrong.
Because these two are absolutely stupid for each other (and I mean that in the least flattering way possible), Anna gets herself banned from the US indefinitely because she can't bear to spend 8-10 weeks away from her boyfriend (and of course he idiotically agrees to anything she says). The rest of the film is basically them as an on-and-off couple, with Jacob visiting intermittently as they try to get the ban lifted (and never once realizing that he could simply move to London until Anna is allowed to leave; his flimsy excuse is that he sells furniture in LA, which apparently is impossible in any other country). They whine and cry (a lot, there are a ton of tears in this movie), and date other people and send each other letters, and the entire time I cannot bring myself to root for them because of their shared stupidity.
Eventually they decide to get married, but even that doesn't immediately succeed in getting Anna's ban lifted. And then, naturally, their relationship begins to really unravel due to jealousy and of course the angst of being two idiots in love. The film ends on a somber note, with Anna's ban lifted at last, and her coming to LA to stay with Jacob (presumably indefinitely, though it isn't clarified). In their last scene together it becomes clear that a great deal of the initial magic of their relationship is gone, and maybe all this struggle wasn't really worth it after all. And I would absolutely feel sympathy for them, if it weren't for the fact that Anna could have gone on that two month break to England and they could've realized the staying power (or lack thereof) of their relationship years earlier than they ultimately do.
But hey, the cinematography and the soundtrack are pretty great, so I can see why it was a favorite at Sundance.
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