Crazy Love (2007)
A bit of old fashioned perversity probably lies under many relationships, but few are as intensely nuts as the sixteen year courtship between Linda Riss and Burt Pugach. Their story begins as a How We Met that your parents may have bored you with as a child, and seemingly ends in something out of a Vincent Price movie. This isn’t the ending though, Pugach tries and tries again, oblivious to obsession, to a wife he already had, to complete psychosis. Pugach may be a monster, but he’s a monster that essentially got things exactly as he wanted. He exemplifies self-absorbtion masked as boundless love. He’s also Exhibit A in “try, try again.”
Crazy Love has a few annoyances, some of the music and visual cues are too self-conscious, too “look how WEIRD we are” in a John Waters kind of way, but the film is haunting in it’s refusal to editorialize. Crazy Love buys into the mania of it’s two leads, and from them a surprisingly universal tale emerges: of ruin, of need, of settling, of a happiness that springs from resignation, from accepting how certain things will never be.
Certain things will never be though, because Burt has arranged them to never be. The film seems to essentially view the ultimate wedding of Burt and Linda as happy in an ironic way, but one can’t help but feel that it’s a happy ending only for Burt, and that Burt has successfully engineered Linda’s downfall so she’ll be in his league. One of the reporters in the film calls Burt the “worst husband since Joey Buttafuoco” and the judgement comes as a relief, finally!, a bit of common sense. Then one of his friends, who’s been speaking on Pugach’s behalf throughout the picture, reasserts the old maxim that “even Hitler had friends.”
Some will see Crazy Love as romantic, as reaffirmation that anyone can have anyone so long as they pay goons to disfigure the object of their affection, but I saw it as something more troubling. Crazy Love is evidence of the extreme force and persuasion of personality, that you can get away with anything if you have balls enough to want to. We see the Pugachs tells their story, and watch them watching one another, and watch them as Burt gets into trouble yet again for another bit of irregular persuasion and we see that Crazy Love is ultimately about the self-delusion that is necessary to weather one crippling disappointment after another. Linda found a kind of happiness, and she eventually found a husband, but she had to adjust her expectations of life. Burt never had to, and probably never will, such is how things go.
★★★½
November 13th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Definitely going to have to check this one out on DVD. It was on my radar, but it came and went pretty quickly in theaters.
Thanks for reminding me of it