Crazy, Stupid, Love. Review

There is a backyard confrontation about eighty minutes in where four separate secrets arrive at once, and it is built and timed well enough to justify most of the contrivance that led there. Ficarra and Requa direct Dan Fogelman's script as a series of two handers, and the best of them are the bar scenes, where Gosling plays Jacob as a man who has mistaken technique for a personality and Emma Stone punctures him by refusing to be impressed.

Their long night of talking and the lift borrowed from Dirty Dancing is better romantic writing than the surrounding film needs. Steve Carell is good at the specific indignity of a man in New Balance sneakers being told his marriage is over in a moving car, and Julianne Moore keeps Emily sympathetic while the script keeps forgetting she is there.

Then there is the babysitter. A thirteen year old's crush on a seventeen year old is played for warmth, the seventeen year old's crush on the father is played for laughs, and the photographs subplot lands somewhere neither funny nor defensible. At a hundred and eighteen minutes the film runs a good half hour past its natural end, and the graduation speech that closes it hands everybody a resolution nobody argued for.