Movie review: 'Crazy, Stupid, Love' stars Steve Carell in winning performance
Cal Weaver is a portrait of middle-age, matrimonial ennui. At home, he’s a bland, straight-laced family man who takes his pretty, high school sweetheart wife, Emily, for granted. At work, he’s a t-crossing, i-dotting cubicle drone who wears sneakers with his khakis and oversize sports jackets.
But in the shrewdly written, smartly directed and beautifully acted “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” Cal’s cozy cocoon home life and frumpy style get a harsh jolt of midlife angst when restless Emily (Julianne Moore, a lovely fount of fidgety frustration) announces in a restaurant one night that she wants a divorce.
That opening stanza in the film’s intricate domestic roundelay is played for rueful laughs, but it sets up a story (scripted by animation veteran Dan Fogelman) that’s informed by loads of traditional romantic comedy conventions that are then turned upside down and played as much for poignant drama as for warm-fuzzy humor.
Everyman comic actor Steve Carell portrays Cal with the sort of bewildered undercurrent of decency and regret that made his performance in 2007′s “Dan in Real Life” such a heartfelt and appealing breakthrough. In this, he continues his inevitable transition from TV performer to movie star.
Cast adrift in the garish, glassy world of singles bars — where predatory playboys such as the cool, sharp-dressed Jacob (Ryan Gosling in a revelatory comic performance) smooth talk their way through night after night of one-night stands — a morose Cal sinks deep into self-pity and listless drinking.
Then one night, for no apparent reason, Jacob takes pity on woebegone barfly Cal and decides to oversee a sartorial makeover and to school this forlorn schlub in the oily ways of picking up women in bars.
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 STEVE CARELL as Cal and JULIANNE MOORE as Emily in...){kind=link}