When it comes to falling in love timing is everything. We
have learned this through years of romantic comedies like “When Harry Met
Sally”, “Manhattan”, and most recently in “The Five-Year Engagement”. Produced
by the prolific Judd Apatow, this film is the follow up effort of director
Nicolas Stoller and co-writer Jason Segal, the creators of 2008’s “Forgetting
Sarah Marshal”. In this film Segal and Stoller bring us another forlorn tale of
love gone astray, brought to us in that sometimes comfortably familiar,
sometimes tired, comedic-slacker perspective.
Jason
Segel and Emily Blunt play Tom and Violet, a young and enthusiastic couple who
have just become engaged. While planning
their wedding in their home city of San Francisco, life throws them a curveball
when Violet is accepted into an academic psychology program in Minnesota. Being
supportive, Tom quits his job as the assistant chef of one of Frisco’s hottest
restaurants and follows his fiancés dream into the cold, cultureless Midwest, where
the best job he can land is at a college sandwich deli. This of course delays
the wedding, and as they plan on getting things back on track newer obstacles
such as promotions, pregnancies, and family deaths keeps pushing their
matrimonial hiatus further and further away from the foreseeable future.
“The
Five-Year Engagement” tries to balance the high concept laughs with the crude
and crass, while still trying to retain a warm heart for its characters and
their plight. Segel’s script commendably
rounds out both the male and female protagonists and gives them both ample
motivations for their behavior. This same script is also unstructured,
undisciplined, sloppy, and at times over indulgent. Scenes drag on too long,
many jokes are only peppered in to create comedy where it didn’t exist, and
entire subplots should have cut out altogether. What results is a flabby five
act comedy where you will feel every single minute of every year of their
engagement.
Luckily
the cast is great. Segel and Blunt have very believable chemistry, and while you
might be literally begging the movie to end at times, on the strength of their
authentic charm you root for their relationship. The side performances from
Brian Posehn, Chris Pratt, Jacki Weaver, and Rhys Ifans often steal the scenes
they are in—sometimes to the movie’s detriment. In fact Jason Segel’s gift as a
writer may be in his peripheral characters (as exemplified by Russell Brand who
stole every scene from “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”). As per-usual Jason Segel seems to be playing
Jason Segel. And after “Freaks and Geeks”, “Sarah Marshall”, “How I Met Your
Mother”, and “Jeff Who Lives at Home”, I really need him to quit playing the lovable
and goofy tall guy who just can’t catch a break. In his next film if he isn’t
playing either a drug addict or a child molester I may scream in my theater
seat.
What’s
most disappointing about “The Five-Year Engagement” is that I strongly believe
there is a 90 minute cut somewhere in there that works. Here is a film that
could have been saved by good editing, but because everyone involved in a Judd Apatow
production seems to have final cut, we are left with a labored mess of a film. Though
there are well-done individual scenes, stand out performances and great
exchanges of dialogue, they are trapped like mice in a meandering maze of a
plot, where by the time we get to the finish it doesn’t feel like the reward
was worth the effort.
Grade: C-
Originally Published in The Basic Alternative/May-2012
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