Nicholas Stoller’s “The
Five Year Engagement” is a relationship comedy about a couple’s long and
turbulent journey, from engagement to marriage, that spans a period of five
years. That’s a long time frame for a romantic comedy. A long time of numerous
stops and starts. A long time of having to make sacrifices for one another. The
couple is Tom Solomon (Jason Segel, the tall oaf with a big heart) and Violet
Barnes (the sweet, charming Emily Blunt) and quite frankly they don’t know what
they want in their relationship.
They both want to be successful; Violet wants to go work at
the University of Michigan and become a professor of psychology, while Tom
would like to run his own restaurant someday, but that doesn’t make for a healthy
relationship. They want to get married but they also want to be selfish
(particularly Violet) and as anyone would know, marriage is about compromise.
Their engagement gets off to a rocky start when Violet
spoils Tom’s special proposal plan that involves him pretending to forget some
receipts and having to go back to the restaurant they were at. Wherein he has a
table set up on the roof looking at the glamorously lit up Golden Gate Bridge.
It’s still successful; she says yes and is delighted by Tom’s effort any way.
We move on to the
engagement party where we get to meet a slew of standard romantic comedy
characters, most notably Tom and Violet’s goofy parents and assorted relatives.
Then those relatives give semi-embarrassing and silly speeches, or in the case
of Tom’s immature friend Alex (Chris Pratt), a slide show featuring all of
Tom’s ex-lovers. But the two are still happy, and still on track, planning
their wedding.
Shortly after however, Violet gets the news that she’s been
accepted to the University of Michigan where she can work on a variety of psychology
projects. This means that they have to move there, which means they have to put
the wedding on hold. But oh! Violet has been working so hard to get this
opportunity. So Tom, being generous, decides
to be supportive and so they pack up and move.
Michigan is like a completely different world (not as
glamorous as San Francisco, but in terms of a typical romantic comedy setting,
it’s still pretty magical looking), a place where the only movie people seem to
talk about is “Ratatouille” and wear ugly, yarn knitted sweaters. Violet
adjusts just fine, getting to conduct social experiments involving donuts and
“The Notebook,” while Tom is miserable, reduced to working at a crummy sandwich
shop and scraping ice off the windshield of his car.
Two years go by and Violet is given an offer to stay at the
university longer, and the wedding gets put off again. Emily continues
fulfilling her dreams, while Tom (living in this strange place for so long)
becomes a bit of a freak. Sporting a handle bar mustache, wearing those ugly
yarn sweaters, and becoming a hunting nut. There’s an amusing dinner scene
where we see cups that have been lined with dear skin, and plates and bowls made
out of deer bones. When will this wedding ever happen?
As I said before, it’s a long journey, but leave it to Judd
Apatow (he wrote and directed “Knocked Up” and “Funny People,” and produced
Stoller’s last two directorial outings “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Get Him
to the Greek”) to produce a mature and immensely satisfying romantic comedy of
sorts. We know that the ending is inevitable but it feels earned. Stoller
directs the movie (for the most part) with great ease; the middle section
involving the Michigan humor is particularity entertaining and swift.
The script by Stoller and Segel is intelligent, funny and
heartfelt. This being an Apatow production, most of its humor is raunchy (with
some peculiar curveball moments thrown in, like when Violet and her sister
Suzie talk in the voices of Elmo and Cookie Monster) but at the same time the
picture makes time for serious and intimate scenes involving Tom and Violet. They’re
still partly funny but endearingly so.
And then there’s Blunt and Segel. As with all romantic
comedies most of the strength is in the two leads, and both of them play
wonderfully off one another. Of recent Segel has proven that he can be funny
but also authentic. You believe in him and his struggles. And Blunt has proven
that she can pretty much have bubbly chemistry with any male lead.
The movie does run a little long, a problem with all Apatow
movies. They have large, character driven stories to tell and they want to be
told thoroughly. You definitely feel
that length in “Five Year,” especially towards the end
Nevertheless the
movie still works overall. At its core (and as in all of the best romantic
comedies) it wants to be funny but also serious and sincere, and it
accomplishes that big time.
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