Like Crazy

Jacob and Anna are a young couple who meet in college.  They fall in love and spend a wonderful year together, before they graduate and it’s time for her to go home to England.  She’s too much in love, though, and decides to stay through the summer before going home.  Mistake.  She’s violated her visa, and now she can’t get back into the country.  So now what.  He’s in Los Angeles, trying to start a business making furniture.  She’s in England, trying to start a business doing some kind of writing.  She can’t come to him, which she’s willing and eager to do.  He could go to her, but he’s not exactly eager nor willing.

I really liked this romantic comedy a lot.  It’s in no way related to the foolish and fun romantic comedies that we mainly see, pumped high with music and full of zany misunderstandings and scenes of shopping and confusion.  There’s none of that stupidness here.  None.  Here we find a couple in the throes of their first true love, deeply in love, and yet…one is more in love than the other.  She’s more willing to give up her family and her home than he is.  Which is interesting, because the movie introduces us to her wonderful, charming parents, not to his.  We see all that she has going for her in England, which she is so willing to give up, and not much of what he might have going for him, which he is not willing to give up.  I would have liked to meet his mother.  (His father died when he was a child.)

What I loved about this movie was how real it seemed.  This is love how it really happens, as opposed to the stupid arguments and star-crossed love of most romantic comedies.  Especially love in the early 2os, when we’re SO open and honest to it, and yet, so very much trying to figure out how our real life might turn out, and who we really want to be, deep down.  The harm of this movie is how it shows the pain of separateness…and not  just a sweet, I Miss You pain, but a real, deep, This Hurts pain, the kind of pain that can easily destroy a relationship, and which anyone who has tried to traverse the waters of a long distance relationship will recognize, even if they find themselves thinking, “there but for the grace of god go I…”