Drake Doremus (2011)
This is a small-scale film but it’s beautifully acted and detailed, and the precise emotional dynamic – of individual scenes and of the movie as a whole – is not a minor achievement. Anna (Felicity Jones) is a middle-class, English home-counties girl, studying journalism on an exchange year at college in Los Angeles. It’s there she meets Jacob (Anton Yelchin), who is going to design and make furniture. They fall in love; when the time comes for Anna to return to England, she decides impulsively to stay on for a few more weeks, beyond the date on which her visa expires. This harmless infringement of the rules defines the couple’s relationship in the months – shading into years – that follow. Anna is turned back by American immigration control when she first tries to get back to LA. So Jacob has to keep coming to London, where Anna has a flat and is developing a promising career as a magazine writer. But Jacob is also doing well at work – his furniture commissions keep taking him back across the Atlantic; and he shares his bed with Sam (Jennifer Lawrence), who helps out in his office, both before and after he marries Anna, on one of his visits to England. Anna too decides, once she’s married to Jacob and the increasing strains on their relationship threaten to destroy it, to start one with someone else – Simon (Charlie Bewley), a posh, dull young man, who’s a neighbour in her apartment building in London. Anna’s decision to ignore the end date of her visa so she could stay longer with Jacob is what prevents their living together in the longer term. Because of the black mark on her immigration record, even a marriage certificate isn’t enough: their attempts to get the paperwork they need through the American Embassy in London are repeatedly thwarted. But when, after much legal wrangling, they succeed, Anna leaves Simon and flies straight out to rejoin Jacob. Like Crazy (words Jacob carved on a chair he made for Anna in the early days of their relationship) ends on the evening of the reunion in LA, when both are coming to realise how hard – probably impossible – it’s going to be to settle down as husband and wife. They apprehend how much of what held them together, or at least kept driving them back to each other, was a bloody-minded refusal to give in to being separated. The consequences of not giving up have been emotionally exhausting. All that battling against the odds has drained their love.
It’s clear from the very start of the relationship that Anna means business and that she’s the more determined character: she’s the one who urges the marriage and who insists it can work, through an act of will. It’s also evident at an early stage that Jacob is relatively relaxed. He accepts it’s time for Anna to go back to Britain and expresses (mild) doubts about her decision to stay on in LA. I was expecting Like Crazy to be an unequal love story, a demonstration of how the sunny, before-life-starts-in-earnest affair between Anna and Jacob means much more to her than to him – a piano variation on the theme of The Way We Were. We can see Jacob is more easily enamoured than Anna; we assume he’ll fail to live up to her demands. But the screenplay, by Drake Doremus and Ben York Jones, is more complex than that. Anna and Jacob both keep trying to do the simple thing, to live and grow apart, but it keeps not working. Anna’s intransigence sometimes oppresses Jacob yet it infects him too. And when they are together, they have a lovely time until the complications in their arrangements spark tension and rows. In the final scene of the film, the couple take a shower together. She wants to clean up after travelling from London; he says he’ll join her as if in the hope that this physical intimacy will force a closeness that neither of them is feeling. Standing in the shower, Anna has two momentary flashbacks to their early times together – flashbacks that make you aware how long ago these seem to you as well as to her. The couple and we have come a long way. Our sympathy with them is completed by the realisation that, like Anna and Jacob, we so much wanted things to work out for them that we lost sight of the fact that this was becoming an end in itself. The victory is a dismaying anti-climax for the audience too.
Felicity Jones registered in her small role in Chéri in 2009 but the delicate incisiveness of her acting here is a revelation; she’s physically slight but she uses that slightness to convey a surprising combination of aspects. In the early scenes, Anna is almost embarrassingly conscious of her charms; she turns from posy elf to terrier in the course of the film – a young woman who’s more admirable than she’s likeable. Anna’s a spoilt only child and, when she’s wailing to Jacob on her mobile that the LA immigration people won’t let her through, I thought it served her right for her impatient selfishness over the visa – yet it’s hard not root for her in her sustained efforts to overcome this fatal error. Anton Yelchin is a fine partner for Jones, with his open, pleasant looks and his rather odd physique (a stocky upper body and skinny legs). As his on-off girlfriend in America, Jennifer Lawrence is more easily expressive than I found her in Winter’s Bone. This third feature by Drake Doremus isn’t perfect. The progression of time by jump cut montage gets to be mannered and Dustin O’Halloran’s score is too wistful too soon – it limits the emotional frame of the film. But the dialogue is excellent – and it never feels improvised in an aimless, saying-things-just-to-keep-a-dynamic-going way. (According to Wikipedia, Felicity Jones has said in interview the piece was ‘fully improvised’.) It’s no mean feat for a young Californian (Doremus is only twenty-eight) to get the nuances of middle-class England as right as this. (It’s something Woody Allen hasn’t come close to achieving.) Jones, and Alex Kingston and Oliver Muirhead as her parents, convey precisely but with a light touch the family’s social status. And Doremus, with the help of his two leads, is very good at creating slightly tense atmospheres in which you can feel a full-scale row brewing. Like Crazy is a bittersweet pleasure.
31 January 2012
