Like Crazy (2011)

Drake Doremus made Like Crazy in 2011 for roughly $250,000, in four weeks, on a Canon still camera, with a fifty-page outline standing in for a screenplay and actors improvising nearly every line. Anna, a British student, and Jacob, an American one, fall in love in Los Angeles, and then a visa overstay gets her banned from the country. That is the entire engine. It won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, took $3.8 million worldwide, and asked nothing of its audience beyond attention.

The cultural inventory comes back empty, and the emptiness carries a period charm. The cast is uniformly white. The romance is entirely heterosexual. The immigration trouble is a bureaucratic obstacle and never a larger argument about borders or belonging. Jacob runs a small design business, and the film shows no curiosity about what he pays anyone. Nobody discusses the climate, the body, the brain, or the historical record. Anna is promoted to editor at a magazine, a modest triumph the film treats as a personal milestone instead of a platform. At no point does a character explain the film to us. The film watches. It does not instruct.

The performances are the reason to bother. Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin improvise their way through silences that most scripts would fill with chatter, and Doremus keeps the camera close enough to catch the hesitation. This is a romance with no additives, no messaging, no thesis, a vintage from a moment when two people falling in love was considered sufficient subject matter for a feature. It is sincere, small, and completely unarmed. A quiet bottle, best opened before someone remakes it with a lesson attached.