Crazy/Beautiful (2001)

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: June 29, 2001

"He's Poor, She's Rich. They're Made for Each Other!"

These days, a realistic Hollywood movie about teenagers seems about as likely as a naughty sex farce from Iran. Early on, ''Crazy/Beautful,'' with its gritty, blue-tinged cinematography, its slangy, mumbled dialogue and its fine-grained feel for the neighborhoods of Los Angeles, looks like an exception. With artful economy, John Stockwell, the director, introduces Carlos Nuñez (Jay Hernandez) and Nicole Oakley (Kirsten Dunst), classmates at Pacific High School who come, wouldn't you know it, from different worlds.

Carlos, hard-working and disciplined, wakes up every morning at dawn to travel, by foot and by bus, from his working-class Mexican-American neighborhood to the school, where he is a football star. He hopes to attend the United States Naval Academy and become a pilot.

Nicole, meanwhile, is a troubled rich girl who lives, with her congressman-father and evil yuppie stepmom, in an elegant glass-walled aerie in the hills. She and her friend Maddy (Taryn Manning) lead lives of big priviledged dissapation. Their exhuberant recklessness expresses the alienation of the overentitled, and is presented in pointed contrast to Carlos's straight-arrow diligence.

He and Nicole first meet on Venice Beach, where she is performing court-ordered trash collection after an arrest for driving under the influence and Carlos is enjoying some rare downtime with his friends. What happens next? Let me consult my critic's dictionary of generic plot descriptions . Yes, here it is: opposites attract. Trouble rears its ugly head. Their lives are changed forever.

The story of their sweet and sexy courtship conclues with an obligatory montage of romantic bliss -- driving on the freeway, frolliking on the beach, watching the sun set over the ocean -- after which the inevitable confrontations ensue in the form of impassioned speeches.

To be fair, ''Crazy/Beautiful'' is not as bad as I'm making it sound. The frustration is that it could be so much better than it is. Ms. Dunst and Mr. Hernandez are both smart actors who come at what could have been cardboard characters from unusual angles. Driven as he is, Carlos is also naïve and sometimes indecisive. And Nicole, underneath her wildness and bad-girl bravado, is not only wounded and angry, but also sensible and dcent. Ms. Dunst doesn't look or sound like a teenage movie idol -- her face is wide and a little blotchy, her voice sometimes squeaks at the upper registers -- but she has an emotional range that few actresses of her age can match.

The problem is that the emotions she portrays with such raw authenticity have been pulled out of the dusty warehouse of convention. The movie suggests she is not only angry and misunderstood, but mentally ill as well, and compounds this dubious notion with the even more dubious conceit that the love of a good man and a few truth-telling confrontations will accomplish what pills and therapy cannot.

And though Nicole and Carlos are conceived and acted with refreshing nuance, the people surrounding them have a flat, made-for-television feel that makes the movie schematic and responsible when it should be brave and honest. The other rich kids are a shade too nasty and selfish, and the nobility and hot-temperedness of Carlos's friends and family carry a whiff of the well-meaning liberal condescension that Nicole manages to avoid.

Speaking of well-meaning liberals, Nicole's father, though cannily played by Bruce Davison, is at once too flagrantly hypocritical to be a nice person and too nice a guy to be liberal an object of satire.

Smoothed over by a lively and varied soundtrack that includes pop and hip-hop songs in Spanish and English, ''Crazy/Beautiful'' intersperses its moments of easy, lyrical sensuality and unassuming realism with canned plot points and reheated speeches. It is an enormous improvement over the brainless, patronizing teenage romances that have slouched into (and quickly out of) theaters in recent years. But it could, if the filmmakers had trusted themselves and the actors a bit more, have lived up to its title.

''Crazy/Beautiful'' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has a few sex scene, some profanity, and implied drug use.

CRAZY/BEAUTIFUL

Directed by John Stockwell; written by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi; director of photography, Shane Hurlbut; edited by Melissa Kent; music by Paul Haslinger; production designer, Maia Javan; produced by Mary Jane Ufland, Harry J. Ufland, Rachel Pfeffer; released by Touchstone Pictures. Running time: 95 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.

WITH: Kirsten Dunst (Nicole), Jay Hernandez (Carlos), Bruce Davison (Tom Oakley), Herman Osorio (Luis), Miguel Castro (Eddie), Tommy De La Cruz (Victor), Rolando Molina (Hector), Soledad St. Hilaire (Mrs. Nuñez), Lucinda Jenney (Courtney) and Taryn Manning (Maddy).

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