Crazy, stupid, love

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Tangy bitter chocolate becomes saccharine mush.

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When two talents direct a scintillating, satirical and star-studded debut comedy about a gay con man, their admirers will let them make such a way-above-average comedy about anything. Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa almost did, lining up Steve Carrel, Julianne Moore and Ryan Gosling for their second intricate romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love., written by Dan Fogelman. The seemingly redundant punctuation marks are a sign of the production team's awareness of verbal values (visibly not shared by the distribution company's poster design).

The directorial duo's first little-seen (in the USA) comic mini-masterpiece was I Love You Phillip Morris. Its screenplay, an adaptation of a biographical magazine article, was co-written by them too. Their previous writing included Bad Santa (way above average too) and Cats & Dogs. Fogelman's track record was built on cartoon screenplays (Cars, Bolt, Tangled), which are tough testing grounds for comic inventiveness.

For its opening half-hour, the trio's joint effort was a classic in the making, a sequence of cunningly comic introductions to its lead characters: a nervously talkative wife (Moore) shocking her laid-back husband (Carell) by announcing her desire for a divorce; their 13-year-old son telling his 17-year-old baby-sitter, after she's found him masturbating, that she's his fantasy passion; her trying to tell Carell that she adores him; and self-pitying Carell getting adopted by a kind-hearted bar-hopping ladies man (Gosling) who promises to teach him how to make his wife rue her folly.

The consequent plot permutations show early potential, especially in cameo parts for Marisa Tomei and Kevin Bacon as the married couple's adulterous flings. The direction and editing are snappy, edgily and funnily so in terms of camera angles and timing.

For their debut feature, portraying madcap manic farce (finely carried off by Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor as gaily besotted homosexuals), the directors could get away (outside North America) with very gay surrealist satire because it was a true story. Unfortunately, for their new fully fictional film, they and Fogelman had to conform to Hollywood rules: it must have a happy ending adorned with family values, a sermon about love, and brave smiles.

In ye olden days of self-censored Hollywood, couples were compelled to be married, always wear pyjamas, and never have both feet off the bedroom floor at the same time. Even in 21st-century Hollywood, cynics and cads must be redeemed, infidelity rued and forgiven, while teenagers must be shown to understand that they love their parents even more.

Such a screenplay cop-out also marred the end of Little Miss Sunshine. Once again, tangy bitter chocolate becomes saccharine mush, satisfying the movie-going needs of sweet-toothed North American families and their hypocritical movie industry. This potentially above-average has earned a small fortune obeying the rules; chocolate connoisseurs might abandon it half-way.