A sad-sack loses his soul mate

Steve Carell joined by a talented cast in Crazy, Stupid, Love

Steve Carell looks like a guy many of us might have gone to school with at some point or other. Carell, who made his big-screen breakthrough in 2005's The 40-Year-Old Virgin, is neither impossibly handsome nor off-puttingly strange? His movie characters sometimes have a sad-sack quality, but can seem entirely normal -- in a middle-of-the-road sort of way. Not a comic who likes to poke a finger in anyone's eye, Carell wouldn't seem out of place on line at a Home Depot store.

An improbable leading man, Carell's comic skills nonetheless have made him a headliner, and his latest comedy -- Crazy, Stupid, Love -- surrounds him with a moderately successful mixture of relationship issues, rom-com cliches and better-than-average farce.

In Crazy, Stupid, Love Carell plays Cal, a married man whose wife (Julianne Moore) tells him she wants a divorce. After a 25-year-marriage that began with a middle-school romance, Cal and Moore's Emily probably are together more out of habit than love. To seal the divorce deal, Emily confesses to an affair with one of her office mates, an accountant played by Kevin Bacon.

Once rejected, Cal slips into full-blown depression. He also becomes an unlikely regular at an upscale singles bar, where he's the proverbial fish out of bottled water. At the bar, Cal meets Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a slick womanizer who decides to give Cal a makeover. Jacob wants to turn Cal into a mirror image of himself, a smooth operator and certified play-ah. This is what's known in the trade as a necessary contrivance, a development that allows the movie to continue and gets Hal off his bar stool.

Crazy, Stupid, Love is a movie composed of meanwhiles, perhaps too many of them. Cal emerges as a love machine, and his eighth-grade son (Jonah Bobo) falls for his baby sitter (Analeigh Tipton), a girl who's four years ahead of him in school. Bobo's Robbie embodies the movie's major theme, which has to do with finding one's soul mate and pursuing him or her without fear of appearing either crazy or stupid.

In yet another "meanwhile," a young woman (Emma Stone)* rebuffs Jacob's advances; she's busy studying for her bar exam. But when Stone's Hannah is slighted by an attorney (Josh Groban) she assumes has fallen for her, she seeks out Jacob in what amounts to an expression of defiance and anger. Of course, Stone's Hannah falls for Jacob, and, of course, he suddenly realizes that there's more to life than sexual conquest. He's in love, too.

Jacob and Hannah close their love deal in a very amusing comic scene that pokes well-deserved ridicule at the final dance sequence of Dirty Dancing with its Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes rendition of Time of My Life. Last seen in the gritty Blue Valentine, the talented Gosling avoids turning Jacob into a caricature. Moore seems a little worn out in an underdeveloped role. An outgoing Stone, with her "I'll-try-anything" attitude, plays well against Gosling's cool.

I laughed at Marisa Tomei's increasingly broad portrayal of the teacher who becomes Cal's first conquest, and who lives to regret it.

Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris) work their way (not always successfully) through the variety of tones in Dan Fogelman's hit-and-miss screenplay. Still, a first-rate cast and a couple of well-staged comic high points push Crazy, Stupid, Love into the plus category. You'll have to make up your own mind about a sentimental, end-of-movie speech that threatens to turn Carell into the Jimmy Stewart of love.

Did it warm my heart? Not really. Carell and Moore never convinced me that they were soul mates. Still, when Crazy, Stupid, Love magnifies a comedy of misunderstanding into moments of giddy farce, it comes awfully close to fulfilling the whacky mandate of its title.

*When initially published,I incorrectly called Emma Stone, Emily Stone. My bad.

Jim Carrey compelling as a con man

Jim Carrey brings dynamo force to the story of a brilliant con man and the guy he loved.

Jim Carrey might be the closest we’ll ever get to a perpetual motion machine in movies. Carrey's irrepressible will seems to drive everything he does, but his high-beam energy and toothy smile serve seldom have served him better than in I Love You Phillip Morris, a movie based on the true story of con man Steven Russell.

During a criminal career that was most active during the ‘90s, Russell posed as an attorney and as a chief financial officer. He was caught a variety of times, and staged several escapes from prison. He evidently excelled at being a criminal and at sidestepping the consequences of his actions -- at least for a while.

Directors Glen Ficarra  and John Requa treat Russell’s story as a platform for energetic comedy, moving from scene-to-scene with hells-a-poppin’ fury. They give the movie a near-antic quality that both complements Carrey’s performance and obliterates thinking time for the audience. It’s almost as if Ficarra and Requa decided that Russell’s story was so intriguing, they had no reason to tack on thematic exclamation points.

Still, I Love You Phillip Morris is more than a con-man caper movie. It’s also a gay love story that blossoms during one of Steven’s prison sentences. In a Texas penitentiary, Steven meets Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor), a sensitive southerner who looks to Steven for both love and protection.

Carrey and McGregor play a convincing duet. Phillip falls under Steven's spell, devoting most of his attention to his lover. Steven, on the other hand, juggles a cornucopia of activities – his life with Phillip, his various scams and lots of wanton spending.

None of this has anything to do with how the movie starts. When the movie opens, Steven -- working as a police officer at the time -- is living what appears to be a conventional life. He's married to a religious woman (Leslie Mann) with whom he has a daughter.

When Steven tells us about his gayness – in a narration that runs throughout the movie – he does so with zesty relish. He treats his gayness in breezy, by-the-way fashion. Like just about everything else in Steven’s life, his sexual orientation is presented as an in-your-face fact, not as an issue for judgment.

Steven either doesn’t see (or refuses to acknowledge that he sees) anything strained about announcing his gayness while he’s still married. And although, Steven often experiences bouts of panic when the police are closing in, he appears to be immune to either guilt or remorse – except perhaps in matters concerning Phillip.

A sense of infectious wildness pervades the material, which requires a generous appreciation of absurdity. If the movie had a mantra, it might go something like this: The world is loopy. Don't try to make sense of it.

I don’t know exactly what we learn from Steven’s story, but I do know that I Love You Phillip Morris moves in lively fashion and that Carrey has delivered a performance that amounts to a sustained act of daring. Not because he's playing a gay man, but because he's playing a character who does despicable things -- but usually without shame. It’s almost as if Steven’s so damn confident about his dynamism that he believes no one possibly could hold his criminality against him.