The precipitating event is an unmating. After two decades of ostensibly happy marriage, Cal Weaver (Steve Carell), an earnest suburbanite for whom stylish leisure wear means New Balance sneakers, discovers that his wife, Emily (Julianne Moore), has been unfaithful and wants a divorce. That promises fidelity to a formulaic plot, and to Mr. Carell's familiar wistfulness. But Dan Fogelman's script takes an abrupt turn to a trendy club where a younger and supremely self-assured womanizer named Jacob (Ryan Gosling) takes pity on the verbosely morose Cal, enlists him as his wingman, sets out to make him over into a stud and instructs him in the not-so-niceties of the dating game. Why would Jacob do this? Don't ask. If he didn't there'd be no movie, and no pretext for him pursuing one of the movie's main themes: "I'm going to help you rediscover your manhood," he announces to Cal. You'd expect Mr. Carell to be funny in the pick-up attempts that ensue, and he certainly is. The revelation is Mr. Gosling's comic chops, which come with a gift for tossing off smart lines at impressively high speed. Better still, he finds his perfect counterpart in Emma Stone, who was sensational as the self-ironic star of "Easy A" and is equally so this time in a smaller role that she transforms into a very big deal. She plays Hannah, a young woman seemingly set to become one more of Jacob's conquests until they repair to his elegant home. Then they share their huge pleasure with each other in an extended sequence that feeds on the logic of love and grows into the film's scintillating centerpiece.Apart from that sequence, with its slow build and lovely development, "Crazy, Stupid, Love" feeds on the logic of a patchwork quilt—exuberant set pieces, punchy vignettes, life lessons (seize the initiative, be true to yourself, fight for what you want) and secret loves that reveal themselves in a climax crazed by design and chaotic beyond measure. Yet the movie also fights for what it wants—to touch us in the course of entertaining us —and it succeeds, with its zinger-studded script that transcends clumsy mechanics and a spirited cast that includes Marisa Tomei as a nymphomaniacal middle-school teacher, and Jonah Bobo as a lovesick eighth-grader. I checked to see if Master Bobo is really as young as his character, and indeed he is, but you'd never know it from his performance, which is eerily witty and scarily wise. A special pleasure of the movie medium is watching actors play double or multiple roles: Lee Marvin in "Cat Ballou," Jeremy Irons in "Dead Ringers," Peter Sellers doing three characters in "Dr. Strangelove," Alec Guinness doing eight in "Kind Hearts and Coronets"—the list is long and goes back to the movies' earliest days. In this latest example, Dominic Cooper is both Uday Hussein, the notorious (and happily dead) son of the Iraqi dictator, and Uday's former classmate, Latif Yahia, a peaceable Iraqi army lieutenant forced into soul-smothering servitude as Uday's "fiday," or body double. The dual aspect of Mr. Cooper's performance is immensely enjoyable, and the film, directed by Lee Tamahori—from Michael Thomas's adaptation of an autobiographical book by Mr. Yahia—leaves no doubt about Uday's vileness. Its star creates a new pinup for the gallery of human perversion, a coke-snorting psychopath with a piping voice who fairly vibrates with delight at the depth of his own depravity.
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