Refreshingly, the standard ethnic/ sexual/class stereotypes don't apply here. "Friends with potential," as Say Anything described it. (It's Nicole's home school, just a few minute from her house poor Carlos is a transfer student who has to get up at dawn and ride two hours on the bus each day to get there.) Not long after that, they start hanging out. Soon enough, Carlos and Nicole discover that they attend the same high school. The scene is charged with sexual curiosity and ethnic tension?and an awareness that those two feelings are possibly indistinguishable. Carlos' buddies watch them flirt (a realistic touch so many high school flirtations amount to a spontaneous public performance for jeering spectators). He's hanging out with his buddies from the neighborhood she's on a state-sponsored work detail, picking up trash under the boardwalk as punishment for a DUI. Nicole meets Carlos Nuñez (Hernandez), a straitlaced football player and academic achiever, at the beach. She's a talented photographer and artist who prints her own black-and-white photos in the school darkroom, then arranges them in a jumbled, poetry-strewn diary/scrapbook but from looking at her, you just know she never cracks a book unless she has to.
Her dad (Bruce Davison) is a widowed congressman who appears to have given up on the idea of disciplining her she stays out as late as she wants, does drugs, sleeps around and shows almost no interest in her future. She's a poster child for upper-middle-class white privilege.
For the most part, it tells the truth about teen love and sex when it does veer away from reality to satisfy formula, it implicitly admits that life isn't really like this, and we know it.ĭunst plays Nicole Oakley, a beautiful but troubled girl who attends an academically respected, mostly white suburban high school. (The film was originally conceived as an R-rated story, but its releasing company, Disney, insisted on a PG-13.) Still, Crazy/Beautiful gets a lot of things right. Their film lingers over things you've already gotten, and skips things you want more of there are holes in the narrative, and its ending is too tidy and happy. This drama about a working-class Mexican-American boy (Jay Hernandez) who falls for a troubled rich Anglo girl (Kirsten Dunst) is intelligent, serious and connected to the world it's so good that you wish it were great.ĭirector John Stockwell and writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi never quite find the right rhythm. Teen romances tend to be so slick, dumb and cynically pandering that when you see one that's even remotely serious and realistic, you're inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt.