Crazy Love is a 2005 film starring Reiko Aylesworth and Bruno Campos and directed by Ellie Kanner.
My opening line there refers to Bruno Campos’ character, Michael, who is said to suffer from severe paranoid delusions due to schizophrenia and has been institutionalised for much of his adult life. In this film, he is portrayed as a loveable prankster who is quite charming and harmless as long as he remembers to take a little pink tablet every day. He hangs out in a psych ward with some other cuckoos who are little more than derivative cardboard cut-outs. They sit around watching Groundhog Day and taking bets on what disorders newcomers are suffering from.
The film starts and ends quite well. What’s in between is cliché-riddled, sappy horseshit. The story is about Letty (Reiko Aylesworth) a well-intentioned but highly strung school teacher who seems to have a mild case of obsessive-compulsive-disorder (she labels all her kitchen products, sorts her underwear by colour and sets 3 different alarm clocks in the morning). She has come up with a fun way to help kids learn maths which leads to a stressful meeting with the school administrator, and on top of that she has to host her divorced parents for dinner (with her father bringing his new wife). Well all this stress is bound to tip Letty over the edge, and does so in spectacular fashion during my favourite scene in the movie that I refer to as “The Olive Meltdown”. This is a great scene – I like the way the lighting and subtle music is combined with increasingly frantic camera movements to build the tension until finally Letty breaks and begins hurling jars of olives at people.
Letty’s mental state is not helped by her narcisstic and condescending partner. And this creates the film’s first sticking point for me. You see, the relationship between Letty and her fiancé would have been so much better if the writer hadn’t made her fiancé such a colossal dipshit. He’s just not believable. He’s such an inconsiderate prick that he crosses the line from character to comical.
Anyway, after the meltdown Letty awakes in the above mentioned psych ward and unfortunately until it finally picks up at the end, the majority of the film is predictable shit. If I’d known all it would take to ‘find myself’ would be to chuck a few condiments at a security guard and hang out with a bunch of fruit loops in a mental hospital that seems to see patients masquerading as doctors as just a harmless bit of fun, well fuck me I’d be the most well-adjusted person on the planet.
Maybe I’m being a bit harsh on this film but it's just too...I don't know...'self helpy'. Michael and Letty are just two lost souls who find each other over sneaky pizza and cigarettes in the linen closet. The film just never steps outside its comfort zone. And I really have trouble imagining the writer has ever known anyone with a serious mental illness – the subject is just never given the gravity it deserves even for a lightweight rom com. Michael’s character is the worst example, he’s said to suffer severe psychotic breaks from reality but seems to just get a bit paranoid if he forgets to take his meds. And as I said before, the other patients at the facility are just assortments of caricatures taken from other movies set in mental hospitals. I almost expected one of them to break out a Simpsons-esque: “Actually, I’m just here voluntarily.”
The film does pick up at the end. I liked that it doesn't go for a ‘happily ever after’ ending – Michael and Letty accept that they will not work as a couple and go their separate ways. I like that the film decided ultimately to be about Letty’s happiness and I liked that she decided she didn’t need her fiancé or Michael in order to find that happiness. It's far from the worst way I can think to spend 100 minutes, but it's further from the best.
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