Oh, memories!
I don’t know if I can describe how much my girlfriends and I loved Crazy/Beautiful when it first came out in 2001. We saw it in the theaters, we rewatched it when it came on cable, and after I bought it on DVD, we watched it at my house. We loved the movie because we all dreamed of having a sensitive, hot boyfriend like Carlos Nunez (played by Jay Hernandez), who would love us no matter how obnoxious or bratty we may have been. Even if we sometimes got annoyed with her, we still all related to out-of-control Nicole (Kirsten Dunst), who everyone in the world had given up on but who ultimately just wanted her father to pay as much attention to her as he did to his new wife and his new baby. We liked the film because we wanted to be both crazy and beautiful.
And, of course, there was all the sex, all of it filmed in beautiful soft-focus with the camera always suggesting that it was showing more than it actually was. Crazy/Beautiful was one of those films that made you feel grown up while still being very careful not to lose its PG-13 rating.
Yes, back in the day, I loved Crazy/Beautiful.
And you know what?
It may just be the nostalgia talking but I still love it. I recently rewatched Crazy/Beautiful and, despite the fact that I was now watching as a “critic” as opposed to a 15 year-old with issues, I quickly fell under the film’s spell. There’s just something about Crazy/Beautiful that I simply cannot resist.
It’s a beautiful film. Director John Stockwell has made a career out of making movies about pretty people hanging out on pretty beaches and Crazy/Beautiful has a lot of both. When Carlos, a responsible high school senior who lives in East Los Angeles and who is hoping to attend the U.S. Navy Academy, first meets Nicole, she’s doing community service by picking up trash on the beach. What Carlos doesn’t find out until later is that Nicole is the daughter of U.S. Rep. Tom Oakley (played, somewhat inevitably, by Bruce Davison). Nicole is haunted by her mother’s death and feels that her well-meaning but ineffectual father has abandoned her. At first, her relationship with Carlos seems to be yet another part of her rebellion but soon, both she and Carlos are madly in love.
Can Carlos save Nicole from herself? Can Nicole love Carlos without leading him down the path of self-destruction? Will Nicole and her father ever reconnect? Will … oh, who cares? You already know the answers. Crazy/Beautiful is less about the story and more about how the story is told. Stockwell keeps the story moving along and fills the screen with colorful and romantic images that make Crazy/Beautiful into the perfect teenage daydream. He also makes perfect use of the undeniable chemistry between Jay Hernandez and Kirsten Dunst. Both of the stars give such good performances that you really do come to care about the characters that they are playing and hope that things work out for them. Kirsten Dunst, in particular, gives a brave performance and doesn’t shy away from playing up Nicole’s abrasiveness. It takes courage to play a character who can be unlikable. It takes talent to make that unlikable character sympathetic and, fortunately, Kirsten Dunst shows a lot of both in Crazy/Beautiful.
Through the Shattered Lens 