Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002. So there.Films that can't explain the ineffable desire two lead characters have for each other tend to have credibility issues. How can the audience suspend disbelief if they don't understand what is keeping the couple together through thick and thin? Often it can work anyway, especially with trickery of the moody lighting, soulful gazing, and well-orchestrated pop-song-love-montage kind. In a film like Drake Doremus's gauzy and drifting romance Like Crazy, the filmmakers don't do much to explain the root of the two lovers' attraction. Instead, it cuts almost immediately to the heartache of their separation. It's a credit to the winsomeness of the leads and the delicate affect of Doremus's direction that such a thin construction manages to work more often than not.
The fresh-faced young lovers in question, Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones), are introduced at the end of the last year of college. There's no chance to get to know them before their relationship and really very little need, as the film operates almost completely within the constraints of their relationship. The meet-cute is low-tech, a handwritten note she passes to him in class, but effective. In very little time they are holding each other tight and convinced that the world wouldn't be too worth living in alone. There is the little matter of British exchange student Anna's visa expiring soon, but with a little adolescent willfulness on her part, she decides not to care about that and stays on in sunny California anyway. Homeland Security has a different opinion on the matter when she tries returning not long after, and so begins the long-distance phase of the relationship.
Jones and Yelchin fill the space with meaningful pauses and bits of dialogue about longing and distance that have a ring of sincerity about them for all their awkwardness. Jones, a more naturally voluble type, seems resigned to her character's fate in a way that Yelchin isn't. His performance is a murmuring coil of tension where his soft-spokenness and mild demeanor are occasionally contradicted by flashes of rage; the latter showing both Anna and the viewer just how little these two really know about each other. The film tries to make up for Jacob and Anna's lack of backstory in elliptical ways. We see her toiling occasionally at a London magazine. Jacob is an artisan with his own furniture shop. Although Jacob is shown sketching out pieces and she is momentarily happy when she gets a raise, these careers serve primarily as engines of distraction to keep the two lovers apart. Throwing more beams onto that barricade are the more conveniently located and arguably more attractive sideline lovers that Jacob and Anna both pick up along the way (a flirty, generous Jennifer Lawrence and Charles Bewley, respectively).
It's easy to care for Jacob and Anna, though, no matter how little one knows about them. While they're both certainly creative, Doremus never overdoes the precious here, which is what one would expect from a story that avoids presenting a more pulse-racing melodramatic style of thwarted romance. The two seem trapped by a love they can't explain or understand beyond the knowledge that their lives would be lesser without it. There are worse traps to be in.
