Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (writers of Bad Santa and the Bad News Bears remake) follow up their lackluster 2009 directorial debut I Love You Phillip Morris with this highly enjoyable throwback to 1980s ensemble romantic comedies. Written by Dan Fogelman (known at this time mainly for animated fare like Cars, Bolt, and Tangled), the picture offers a refreshingly sincere change of pace from the Aughts climate of assembly line romcoms, vulgar slapstick, and labored improvfests. Unlike most studio and indie comedies of the prior decade, this movie starts a little slightly and gets stronger rather than the other way around. The story follows a schlubby middle-aged divorced sadsack (Steve Carrel) who gets schooled by a hip, cool, pickup artist (Ryan Gosling) on how to up his game. That fun but limited premise unexpendably expands its focus to include the other members of Carrel's family and provides the Gosling character with his own narrative arc when he becomes involved with a young, soon-to-be lawyer (Emma Stone). The film gets richer and more entertaining as we learn more about each character.

What gives Crazy, Stupid, Love its '80s vibe is both the earnestness of its emotional core and the intricacies of its narrative structure. This does not fall into the current TV sitcom trend where multiple storylines seem to exist only so writers don't have to write complete scenes and can just bounce back and forth from one group of characters to another. Fogelman crafts a screenplay where every scene has a beginning, middle, and end, and each beat builds upon the other. The comedy grows out of the situations—it's not laugh-out-loud funny, but the humor is earned. Also like an '80s romcom, this picture feels made for thirty to fifty-year-olds rather than fourteen to twenty-four-year-olds. The cast is excellent. You don't really know how perfectly cast everyone is until the third act, but the specificity of casting helps the plot's clever contrivances feel smooth as silk. Carrel (who also produced the film with the legendary Denise Di Novi) seems, at first, too stiff and listless to carry the movie, but by the end, we realize he's the ideal choice. Gosling and Stone have a wonderful extended scene near the middle of the movie in which they seem like they're having more fun than in any of their much-lauded musical numbers in La La Land five years later.