A couple of days ago, I finished reading a young adult fairy tale and I watched an indie love story.
The book is Enchanted by Alethea Kontis (and isn't that an amazing name?) and the movie is Like Crazy starring Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones. Enchanted is about a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter named Sunday who meets a talking frog, and unbeknownst to her, turns him back into a man, an old enemy of her family's. Every part of Sunday's family and life are pieces of recognizable fairy tales, but the story isn't overcrowded or obnoxiously self-aware, it's sincere. The characters are cleanly defined in an effortless way, and the relationships are both simple to understand and not simple at all. Like Crazy is about two college students, Jacob and Anna, who fall in love in a lovely montage of simplicity, but Anna, a British student in L.A., overstays her student visa. Their love story is about their separation and how and when they come back together over a span of several years. The actors were natural and the balance between the silent montages and the scenes with dialogue was well-done, but there were very few moments of visibly heightened emotion.
Both the book and the movie are simple, and I mean that in the best way. Their creators didn't succumb to any pressures to turn simple love stories into something larger or unwieldy. Don't mistake me, I love complicated and extravagant stories, but these stories are driven by the characters, and they didn't require anything fancy. The chapters in the book and scenes in the movie flow one into the other, although they switch from following the male to the female and to them both when they're together.
Enchanted has a sweetness and a sincerity that pulled me in and endeared me to (almost) all of the characters, and even if I was sure of the ending, I enjoyed all of the ins and outs of the storytelling, the way the myriad pieces of existing fairy tales were woven together to form the ending. But while I enjoyed the realistic relationship, look and dialogue, and the progression of Jacob and Anna's love story, Like Crazy didn't show me enough of the characters for me to really care how their story ended.
Like Crazy was watchable and the sort-of-melancholy texture of the storytelling stayed with me, and I was grateful that it didn't fall prey to some of the typical pitfalls of the indie love story, like grandiosity or an overpowering soundtrack. But neither the characters nor the plot had enough weight for me to take it seriously, while Enchanted, intended for young adults who are often treated as emotional featherweights, touched me with its clever use of classic fairy tales to tell an engaging romance.
