There is this obscure faction called "mumblecore" floating around somewhere under the realm of independent film. Mumblecore films are extremely naturalistic and often focus on young, white intellectuals — two cinematic characteristics that should make the genre accessible and appealing to an English major like myself.
However, I have not enjoyed any of the handfuls of mumblecore films I have seen thus far. Originating back to the early 2000s, the genre is full of boring, unfocused and cheap Tarantino knockoffs without plots. The mumblecore formula is as follows: Throw in a bunch of banal but lifelike dialogue, pretend the camera is just a voyeuristic floating eyeball and hope the final product comes off as revelatory to recent college graduates from liberal arts schools.
But this weekend, I may have seen the perfect mumblecore film. Thanks to a great tip from Mama Teicher, I bought a ticket for "Like Crazy" at the Kendall Square Cinema. Starring Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones as two young lovers who are forced to be apart because of U.S. immigration laws, "Like Crazy" has the subject matter of a mainstream romantic drama mixed with the laissez−faire style of a mumblecore movie. These qualities blend "Like Crazy" into a raw, pulpy and romantic masterpiece. This may be the best chick flick since "The Notebook" (2004) came out. Strong words, I know.
It would be a bit misleading for me to say that "Like Crazy" has a plot. It's more like a scrapbook of a relationship between Sam (Yelchin) and Anna (Jones). Sam, an American, and Anna, a Brit, begin their romance at college in Los Angeles, but after graduation, the couple runs into self−inflicted problems when Anna overstays her student visa. This is, after all, the post−Sept. 11 world where immigration laws are unrelenting. Not even cute British girls can charm the border police.
For the rest of the film, Sam and Anna are separated by the Atlantic Ocean, and their love is strained by the torture of a long−distance relationship. Sam visits Anna a few times, but she is unable to come back to America to see him. They develop separate lives with new friends and love interests, but their love never disappears. The scenes push forward perfectly without transitions, jumping between Los Angeles and London over the course of nearly a decade. If "Like Crazy" were a piece of literature, it would be a book of connected short stories rather than a novel.
The little vignettes strung together turn "Like Crazy" into something more than just mumblecore. Perhaps the strategy used by director Drake Doremus is the ideal model for any mumblecore movie — although the material is not standard chick−flick fare, it is not aimless mumbling, either. There has to be a balance between every Katherine Heigl movie ever made and complete cinematic anarchy.
I believe this type of balance is what every mumblecore director failed to achieve before Doremus. We live in a culture that frowns upon sentimentality. It is better to be sarcastic and ironic. And that is why, until now, mumblecore has failed. Most mumblecore films are so detached and flippant that it is impossible to feel anything other than numbness when watching them. But not with "Like Crazy." Doremus' film embraced sentimentality and captured the angst that drives college students crazy. It harnessed the uncertainty of our lives — the lack of career direction and the unpredictability of romantic relationships — and it projected those feelings on screen for an hour and a half.
I want to leave you with a passage Anna reads aloud to Sam in the beginning of the film: "I thought I understood it. But I didn't. Only the smudgeness of it. The eagerness of it. The idea of it. Of you and me."
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Jordan Teicher is a senior majoring in English. He can be reached at Jordan.Teicher@tufts.edu.
