'Crazy Eyes' review: Truth is sometimes painful
Updated 4:35 pm, Thursday, July 12, 2012
There are the relationships that inspire movies - those usually make sense as stories. And then there are the relationships that people often find themselves in, that never get movies made about them, because they are pointless and repetitive, despite all their drama and passion. "Crazy Eyes" is about the second kind of relationship, the kind no one writes poems or novels about, the kind folks get enough of in real life.
The resulting film has the integrity and the ugliness of the truth. It's not true because it's ugly; no, it's ugly because it's true. Lukas Haas plays a rich young jerk, in the early stages of alcoholism, who gets into a peculiar drinking-buddy relationship with a woman he calls Crazy Eyes (Madeline Zima). They kiss and cuddle and pass out in bed together, but she won't have sex with him no matter how hard he tries, and sometimes he tries so hard it makes the audience uncomfortable. She has to fight him off.
He's a creep, and she's on her way to becoming a pathetic drunk; and director Adam Sherman and his co-writers, to their credit, understand this. They don't think all that much of these people, either. This is, in its way, almost fascinating, and equally interesting is its portrait of wealth. Without the movie ever saying it, the protagonist, who pretends not to care about money, is all about the money - flaunting it, flashing and using it to pick up women who would otherwise have nothing to do with him.
The money also makes other people strangely interchangeable for him. The draining, suffocating, sickening party that follows this young man is really following the money, and there will always be people willing to follow the money.
The limits of the film don't kick in until after an hour, and these limits are the same as that of the life depicted onscreen. It goes nowhere. It's the same thing over and over. It's unpleasant and distasteful, ultimately boring, and who cares? Except you do end up caring - a little.