Okay, so Crazy Stupid Love is a rom com made in 2011 starring Steve Carrell, Emma Stone, and Ryan Gosling. They all do an excellent job playing the roles that they play in this movie. I don’t have any problems with the heavy hitters of the story. That’s not what this is about. No, I’m going to talk about the least cohesive character in an otherwise great movie. And that character is Cal’s (Carrell) son, Robbie.

Before I get too into the weeds about this awful character, let me talk about the movie as a whole. The movie starts as any typical ‘lovable oaf turned smooth talker’ story does; Cal gets blindsided with news of his wife wanting a divorce. She awkwardly tells him about the other man, a coworker named David Lindhagen. This makes Cal obviously so uncomfortable that he flees from the conversation. Oh, did I mention that they were having this conversation in a moving car? Cal leaves by flinging himself out of the car. Honestly, I can relate to this move. I’ve jumped out of elevators for less awkward conversations. After that disaster, we find our plucky little drunkard in a bar. Cal gets super drunk and badgers complete and total strangers about his poor unfortunate soul and how he got cuck’d by David Lindhagen. Yeah, he actually says that, “David Lindhagen made a cuckold out of me.” Pretty sure there’s another line about that word not being used very often. Well, I don’t think you have to worry about that anymore, Hal! So this twisted display of pity and self-loathing is observed by a regular at this bar. Let’s call him Jacob, because that’s his name. So let me back up a smidge and introduce this fellow by way of how the movie does. A new character floating in the aether named Hannah.

Hannah is a young girl who is a serial monogamist studying to become a lawyer. I think. Her career doesn’t really matter in the movie’s story. Point is, she’s dating the world’s most lifelike doorstop. I honestly forget the dude’s name in this part, so let’s call him Dingleworth. Anyway, Hannah is at the destined bar with her supporting character bestie who I think deserved her own romantic plot. The two of them are talking about Dingleworth, and how Hannah is expecting him to propose after she passes the bar exam. While these two are having a serious conversation about boys, Jacob overhears them and hits on Hannah. He throws some, well, pretty weak game at her, to be honest. Her sidekick friend is immediately infatuated with him, because, you know, Ryan Gosling. Hannah turns him down and goes off into a hobbit cave to become lawyer-person.

Back to Cal. As Cal bores another woman into a withered skeleton for the twenty third time, Jacob whistles to him from across the bar. Cal approaches him, and Jacob buys him a drink and echoes the sad story about him being cuckolded by David Lindhagen back at him because he’s so completely done with his sad sack routine. So Jacob, being the kindhearted soul that he is, decides to take pity on Cal and teach him how to pick up women in bars. This goes well for a while, until Cal has an awkward encounter with a one-night stand that turned out to be one of his son’s teachers. Jacob disappears off the face of the planet.

Hannah emerges from her dragon den and passes the bar exam. While celebrating, she wants so desperately for Dingleworth to marry her and bear her several boring children. He doesn’t, obviously. He offers her a position at his law firm, which makes her so angry that she dumps him on the spot, drink her bodyweight in other people’s cocktails, and go back and “bang the hot guy at the bar.” She goes to Jacob, kisses him on the mouth, and the two of them go to his place for an evening of heartfelt conversations and perusing through Jacob’s As-Seen-On-TV collection. Jacob ghosts Cal because of his new girlfriend. When Cal gets a hold of him, he reveals that he is going to meet his girlfriend’s parents. Cal takes his son’s horrible advice and tries to woo his ex-wife with a romantic gesture. While there at his ex’s house, Cal and Jacob run into each other, and it is revealed that Hannah is actually Cal’s oldest child. David Lindhagen shows up, and hilarious punchings ensue.

There’s an ending with those two, but I can’t exactly talk about it without talking about the most problematic character in this entire movie. His name is Robbie Weaver, and he is Cal’s middle child. As for his role in the movie, he is supposed to be the movie’s moral compass. He constantly complains about how his dad is going out on dates a lot, and how Cal was so quick to give up on his marriage. Here’s where it gets really bad. See, little Robbie has a crush on his babysitter, Jessica. Jessica has no romantic interest in him at all. In fact, she actually has a crush on Cal. Jessica’s feelings have virtually no effect on Robbie’s intentions to woo, date, and marry her. So he attempts to woo, date, and marry her. How does he do this, you may ask? Well, let’s rewind and see how their relationship starts in the movie.

Cal presumably called Jessica to watch Robbie and his youngest daughter while he and his soon to be ex-wife go out for dinner, because she’s babysitting them. While she’s there, Robbie decides to behave like a young boy with a crush, and he starts pleasuring himself. Innocent Jessica has a question for him and barges into his room while he’s doing this. She cries out after catching him in the act and quickly closes the door. Mortified, she tries to forget the horrors she just witnessed, but Robbie wants to talk about it. He decides that not only is he unashamed of what happened, but that his object of desire while masturbating is, in fact, Jessica herself. Talk about star-crossed lovers, am I right?

So, Robbie gets it in his head that he absolutely must have Jessica, consequences be damned. In between sending her what can be assumed to be massive amounts of inappropriately aggressive texts, Robbie decides to build a stage and wheel it out into the middle of the cafeteria right before everyone has lunch. He stands up on the stage and proclaims his love for Jessica, emblazoned with a Scarlet J on his chest (their class is learning about the Scarlet Letter. It’s really not all that important to the story) and completely humiliating her in the process. Jessica has to basically pull him down off of the stage and, finally, after she tells him that she’s in love with someone else, he relents his aggressive conquest of trying to win her over.

Let’s talk about Jessica for a second. See, Jessica has her own quest of love, but it’s a little more subtle than Robbie’s. She’s in love with the father of the family she’s been babysitting for years. Yup, it’s Cal Weaver that she has the hots for. Granted, this story thread doesn’t really go anywhere and only has a single climax. Jessica asks an older classmate how to get with older dudes, and she gets the advice that she needs to show Cal a side of her that isn’t a kid. So, in pursuit of this, she takes some polaroid photos of herself naked and sticks them into an envelope with Cal’s name on it. Yeah, I know. The movie is a little older than sexting, but not older than smart phones, so I don’t really get using an old camera, either. So, around the time Jacob is making David Lindhagen drink his own teeth, Jessica’s mother is snooping through her daughter’s dresser drawer (because parents are generally terrible) and finds the envelope. She gives it to Jessica’s father, who sees the naked photos and goes into a psychotic rage and drives to Cal’s house. He gets there and punches Cal until Jessica reveals that Cal has no idea about the photos. Cal freaks out, and Robbie finds out that Cal is the dude that Jessica is into.

Okay, so nobody who is underage in this movie is a good positive role model, I will concede that point. I really don’t know what the writers were thinking when they wrote all of that. Problematic is almost too weak of a word for it. Anyway, Robbie and Cal end up playing catch later, and Robbie tells Cal that he has given up on love entirely because Cal gave up on his marriage. Cal says that it’s more complicated than that, and Robbie tells him he’s wrong and storms off.

Now, the final climax of the story. Robbie graduates from eighth grade and has somehow found time between aggressively harassing Jessica to be valedictorian. He gives a jaded speech about how there is no love in the world and that hope is dead. This kid is like twelve, by the way. So, after his speech bums everyone out, Cal takes to the mic and proclaims that Robbie has become a sad little husk of a man because his recent failed murder-suicide caused the girl of his dreams to predictably run for the hills. He encourages his little nightmare of a child to pick himself up, dust himself off, and continue to harass this teenage girl by proclaiming his undying love for his ex-wife in a similar fashion to this ankle biter kid.

The story ends with Robbie telling Jessica that, since she has a crush on his father, he’ll come back for her affections when he grows up and starts to look like Cal. This prompts Jessica to give him the naked polaroid pictures (man, I feel so old) that she took to give to Cal. Aww, that’s such a cute ending for this nightmarish lil perv!

There is a ton of things wrong with this character because the movie itself tries to tell his story through his perspective in a light-hearted romantic comedy. Here’s the big, overarching issue I have with Robbie as a character. He’s the voice of reason in this story. Robbie is the character that forces Cal to see the ‘error of his ways’ and go back on his swinging bachelor lifestyle he built with Jacob’s help because he’s trying to have this romantic love story based on proud and misguided declarations of love to his own babysitter. Because it is framed this way, the fact that Jessica’s feelings towards Robbie isn’t reciprocated aren’t taken into account. It removes her agency as a character and turns her into more of a trophy or prize to be won. In fact, the only part of this whole situation that the movie got right is that Robbie doesn’t end up with Jessica.

As a writer, I cannot stress enough how bad of a choice this is to make for similar stories. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with this setup in a story. Tons of guys do this kind of thing in real life, so it makes sense that a character would attempt to win someone’s affection in this way. However, this is not behavior that is supposed to be rewarded. A character should start out behaving this way at the beginning of the story, experience conflict in their attempt to behave like a unredeemable goblin, and be forced to change their behavior into something more like how an actual human would act.

Moral of the story: When you watch Crazy Stupid Love, don’t root for Robbie.

-Rj