The Character of Jacob Palmer

Crazy, Stupid, Love. remains, absolutely undoubtedly, as one of the best romantic comedies; not only of recent years, but of all time. This time around, we’re not focusing on the film; we’re focusing on a character, and more specifically, on Ryan Gosling’s character – Jacob Palmer.

(Watch Crazy, Stupid, Love. here.)

This character analysis, unlike our others, will be much more deductive than usual. While there is plenty revealed about Jacob on screen, a lot of his substance actually lies under careful analysis of conversation and behavior. So let’s go.

Would you ask me — something personal about myself?

We will begin with a quotation from Jacob’s first night with Hannah (Emma Stone).

Jacob: Would you ask me — something personal about myself?
Hannah: What’s your mother like?
Jacob: My mom — is very beautiful. Um — very vain. Very smart. Cold.
Hannah: And your dad?
Jacob: Um — he died a long time ago. He was such a sweet guy. Very successful. In business. And he made a lot of money, which is why I have — all this stuff.

There is a plethora of information in those five lines of dialogue. Let’s break it down.

The father.

Jacob says his father was such a sweet guy. Later on, in the same scene, he also says he was too soft — too sensitive. This can be connected to both Jacob as a person and his relationship to Cal.

When Jacob first meets Cal, Cal asks him why he is helping him, to which Jacob replies that he reminds him of someone. This can relate, simultaneously, to two things: Jacob’s father and an earlier version of Jacob himself.

If his father was truly too soft, it could very easily mean that Jacob, as a child, was too soft as well. He was like his father — he also wanted to be like his father since he was a genuinely kind and sweet person. Later on, however, probably through his relationship with his mother, and influenced by his father passing, Jacob Palmer is forced to change. The world hits him; he loses the sweetness, looses the sensitivity, and hides under a shell. He sees, because of his father, that the world is not fit for sweet man, and decides to change and adapt and hide.

Truly, it’s quite tragic; Jacob loses his role model and, because of that, he kills that part of himself the role model left.

Probably — because of his mother.

A vain, beautiful woman. A smart woman and, possibly, probably, a very strong pragmatic person. The alpha in the family. The one he is left with after his father passes and the one who forces him to become ‘stronger’ and hide himself from the world.

Which brings us back to the original point — who does Cal remind Jacob of? His father, yes, because Cal is sweet and innocent, but also Jacob himself — or the part of Jacob that used to carry his father with him.

But because of a strong, vain woman, Jacob looses the playfulness in his life. He loses — the color. He is forced to escape, forced to apply this new-found, yet profoundly fake, confidence and character to the world.

So he finds his escape through women.

Countless women, not only to get some excitement in his life, but also as a way to find a sense of achievement. A sense of success. Proof that who he has become, who his mother has made him, is actually someone good and successful. Because everything that Jacob has, all of his success, it’s not truly his; it’s what his father left him. He has, truly, nothing, so he has to find self-fulfilment through meaningless relationships with random women.

As we said: quite tragic.

That is, at least, until he finds Hannah. And here is where the irony of Crazy, Stupid, Love. becomes evident. Hannah is the first real color in Jacob’s life; the first actual piece of happiness, the first real thing that is actually his. And she, ironically, literally comes from an old version of himself — she is Cal’s daughter. So Jacob ultimately finds happiness in the past — he finds it coming from that old version of who he used to be, the version who used to be happy, the version that comes from his father.

Hannah is not something he achieves.

Because Jacob Palmer is actually quite convoluted — he thinks, again probably because of his family, that achievement equals success. Achievement in work, or achievement in life, through women. But that is not the case, especially for him. For him, happiness is a person — nothing he achieves, nothing he finds for, just true human connection.

She is Cal’s daughter, Cal is an old version of himself, and that older version of himself is his father — needless to say, relationships in Crazy, Stupid, Love. are quite Shakespearean. And what does Shakespeare write? You guessed it — comedies and tragedies.

Boom.

At the end of the day, Jacob Palmer is a deeply sad person. One constantly looking for something; something of the past; something close to his father; something his mother hasn’t been able to strip away; something that finally gives him fulfilment; something real. And he finds it. Definitely not where he’s looking, but it doesn’t matter. That was his problem: he was looking too much, thinking too much, hiding too much. He should have just — let go.

Get the Crazy, Stupid, Love. Blu-Ray here.

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— Pouty Boy