As it currently plays, Crazy/Beautiful is like Mad Love (or The Sterile Cuckoo, or any of your favorite "she's nuts, but he loves her eccentricity" romances) meets Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. It's a teen romance. It's a problem drama. It almost always feels like one of several other movies. And yet the cast is strong, the direction is frequently fresh, and for a long time that's enough to keep Crazy/Beautiful interesting.
Nicole (Kirsten Dunst) and Carlos (Jay Hernandez) meet on the beach. He's hanging with his homies and she's performing community service picking up trash. They hit it off, but they're both more complicated than they seem. She's a depressive alcoholic sun of a Congressman (Bruce Davidson), while he's a football player who dreams of going to the Naval Academy and rising up from the barrio of East LA. Naturally they fall in love, but naturally there are obstacles. He's going places and she's going crazy, for example. But will love overcome said obstacles? It seems possible.
Crazy/Beautiful's script, by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, frequently seems too structure-bound.In this roughly 100 minute film, you can easily chart the beats as Nicole and Carlos develop their relationship against the odds and fall in love only to have the odds escalated partway through Act 2. There's an awkward "Happy Montage" around the 45 minute mark that's painfully scripted. They also touch on many themes constant to the Outsider Romance genre.
Director John Stockwell (apparently Dean's son) seems to be making a slightly different film. This is as gritty as a mainstream studio teen romance can be. Stockwell and his DP Shane Hurbut revel in oversaturated day scenes and grainy night footage. The editing is pleasantly jangly, perhaps the only film in the recent teen cycle to effectively use a jump cut (unless I'm missing such freshness in She's All That or Can't Hardly Wait). Stockwell nicely shoots his attractive leads and gets fine performances from each.
You wish, however, that Hernandez's character was darker. His life feels oversanitized, but around the edges you see hints that things could have been more interesting -- the Hispanic girl his mother obviously prefers to Dunst, his less intelligent brother, etc. Dunst's character feels similarly sketched out. I wished her depression arc had been better established. There's no question that the character is messed up, but mostly she just seems to have a drinking problem. Since the film's dialogue makes it clear that the problems are far more serious, it would have been interesting to see that.
I get the feeling that Stockwell made a darker and more complex drama and that he had to tone down language, depression, and sexuality in order to land a PG-13 movie. And that's disappointing because I would guess that many of my complaints could have been handled with ten or fifteen minutes more footage. As it is, I liked this movie enough to give it a 6/10, but I wished that it had more to set it apart.
Nicole (Kirsten Dunst) and Carlos (Jay Hernandez) meet on the beach. He's hanging with his homies and she's performing community service picking up trash. They hit it off, but they're both more complicated than they seem. She's a depressive alcoholic sun of a Congressman (Bruce Davidson), while he's a football player who dreams of going to the Naval Academy and rising up from the barrio of East LA. Naturally they fall in love, but naturally there are obstacles. He's going places and she's going crazy, for example. But will love overcome said obstacles? It seems possible.
Crazy/Beautiful's script, by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, frequently seems too structure-bound.In this roughly 100 minute film, you can easily chart the beats as Nicole and Carlos develop their relationship against the odds and fall in love only to have the odds escalated partway through Act 2. There's an awkward "Happy Montage" around the 45 minute mark that's painfully scripted. They also touch on many themes constant to the Outsider Romance genre.
Director John Stockwell (apparently Dean's son) seems to be making a slightly different film. This is as gritty as a mainstream studio teen romance can be. Stockwell and his DP Shane Hurbut revel in oversaturated day scenes and grainy night footage. The editing is pleasantly jangly, perhaps the only film in the recent teen cycle to effectively use a jump cut (unless I'm missing such freshness in She's All That or Can't Hardly Wait). Stockwell nicely shoots his attractive leads and gets fine performances from each.
You wish, however, that Hernandez's character was darker. His life feels oversanitized, but around the edges you see hints that things could have been more interesting -- the Hispanic girl his mother obviously prefers to Dunst, his less intelligent brother, etc. Dunst's character feels similarly sketched out. I wished her depression arc had been better established. There's no question that the character is messed up, but mostly she just seems to have a drinking problem. Since the film's dialogue makes it clear that the problems are far more serious, it would have been interesting to see that.
I get the feeling that Stockwell made a darker and more complex drama and that he had to tone down language, depression, and sexuality in order to land a PG-13 movie. And that's disappointing because I would guess that many of my complaints could have been handled with ten or fifteen minutes more footage. As it is, I liked this movie enough to give it a 6/10, but I wished that it had more to set it apart.