The rich, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously (and much overabusedly) wrote, “are different from you and me,” and Crazy Eyes tests just how much an audience will be able to care about their problems despite this fact. Wealth isn’t the explicit topic of the film, but it colors everything about it, from the swank house in the hills in which Zach (Lukas Haas) lives to the women who trail after him with dollar signs in their eyes to the way that he seems to have nothing to fill his time with except alcohol. The privilege isn’t the problem so much as how it has shaped our protagonist — a self-absorbed, self-pitying Los Angeles asshole who happens to be in a self-destructive phase. The motivating factor of the film is Zach’s pursuit of something, for once, he isn’t easily able to have — Rebecca (Madeline Zima), to whom he’s given the nickname “Crazy Eyes,” a girl who’ll drink herself into oblivion at his side but who won’t sleep with him.
Crazy Eyes is the third directorial effort from Adam Sherman, and is, like his 2010 Happiness Runs, based on his own personal experiences, suggesting he either has a staggering sense of self-laceration or a just as noteworthy lack of awareness about audience empathy. The close of the film would seem to indicate the latter, as it finds Zach murmuring in his periodic noir-style voiceover that “I could tell you pleasing details, like maybe I quit drinking or ended up with a beautiful girl, but I don’t feel like telling you stuff like that, because if I told, and it was true, then I’d probably mess it up like everything else.” Until that point, the film has done so little to make you hope for or invest in any way in Zach’s redemption that the…
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