Crazy Stupid Love is in the vein of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where a series of misadventures resulting from grave misunderstandings have everyone falling in, out of, and over one another to delirious comic effect. It’s a story that never gets old if told very well.

We start our journey with Cal Weaver (Steve Carell), who receives the news from his wife Emily (Julianne Moore) that she wants a divorce because she’s been sleeping David (Kevin Bacon), her colleague at work. In his depression, Cal heads to bars to pick women up, all but failing due to his awkwardness, when he meets ladykiller Jacob (Ryan Gosling) who gives him a few lessons in seduction, upon which he bags Kate (Marisa Tomei). Meanwhile, Cal’s son is in love with his babysitter, who is in turn in love with Cal, while law student Hannah (Emma Stone) is in for some romantic surprises of her own...

If the above summary is getting a bit confusing for you, don’t worry. The film proceeds with such gentle whimsy and invests such care in its characters that you’ll feel compelled to follow their exploits as they stumble from one misunderstanding to a bigger mishap, which results in an even bigger misadventure.

Glenn Ficarra and John Requa prove up to the task. As they did previously with I Love You, Philip Morris, their films are marked by a love of classic screwball comedy, driven by character rather than cheap gags, and permeated with an overall sense of whimsy, and so timeless they could be set in the 17th Century as well as the 21st. Aided by excellent cinematography from Andrew Dunn, Ficarra and Requa create a movie with the feel of a fairytale, an insular, dream-like reality through which their heroes and heroines move in a narcotic state, maddened and enraptured by the sheer follies of love, and the extents to which they will go in their madness.

Perhaps it is due to the very nature of such stories, but Ficarra and Requa end up with something rare for a romantic comedy these days in their ending: of all the romantic comedies I have seen this year, this is one of the few that does not opt for a pat, tidy resolution, but seems instead to suggest, with a wink in its eye, details of the follies to come. Ficarra and Requa, working from a screenplay by Dan Fogelman, know the fun is in knowing that what fools we mortals be, and like Puck, they know starting the ball rolling and watching everyone work it through is where the fun is.

Crazy Stupid Love is a whimsical little roller-coaster of mishaps, misunderstanding and misadventure, with which Ficarra and Requa can proudly add to their list of achievements in the creation of good screwball comedy for the 21st Century.