Crazy, Stupid, Love is the story of forlorn husband Cal (Steve Carell) as he struggles to come to terms with the abrupt news of his wife wanting a divorce.  While Cal is taken under the wing of ladies man Jacob (Ryan Gosling), the film also follows several other parallel, or seemingly random, love stories, including Cal’s love-sick teenage son, and Hannah (Emma Stone), a play-it-safe law student, who begins the film by turning Jacob down at a bar.

The film thus feels disconnected for the first half of the film; the characters meet in random, accidental circumstances, and that’s only if they meet at all. The audience spends a good part of the film struggling to find some sort of link, which, when it does come around, proves horribly convenient.

By also jumping straight into the story, presumably to mimic Cal’s shock at his wife’s sudden revelation, we get very little back-story. Similarly, Jacob’s desire to help Cal seems to spring from nowhere; rather than provide mystery, it just adds to the confusion and prevents full identification with the characters. 

The audience must then try and make do with some laughs to compensate for this frustrating structure. While the film is at points funny, the audience is never quite sure how funny it is meant to be. For instance, when a drawn out shot of Jacob eating in slow motion is accompanied by ‘epic’ music, the audience is unsure if this is meant to be ironic, and, if it isn’t, why it then makes the viewer want to laugh. 
Evidently, Crazy, Stupid Love seems to mimic the likes of Love Actually in its attempt to weave a web of stories, but the characters are neither numerous enough nor fully developed enough to hold this together. With all these stories colliding, the film involves a lot of false conclusions, making the audience spend the last half of the film waiting to leave. Nothing really stands in their way, save perhaps Ryan Gosling’s torso.