The Five-Year Engagement is an ambitious film by Hollywood rom-com standards. The script, by director Nicholas Stoller and lead actor Jason Segel, aims for charm and pain and laughs and truth. The presentation is slick, with the beauty of San Francisco and small town Michigan backdropping the comedy, captured with above-average photography that screams, "This isn't your run-of-the-mill Katherine Heigl flick!" Five-Year Engagement is a shotgun blast of grand ideas, every element spread so thin it ends up being not that charming, not that painful, not that funny and not that truthful.
Tom (Segel), a professional cook, and his girlfriend Violet (Emily Blunt), a hopeful psychology student, have been dating for one year before the question is finally popped. They seem perfect for one another, understanding the other's perspectives, sharing sensibilities and helping each other loving life to the fullest. The couple's wedding planning process is slow and steady, but when the date is finally in sight Violet finds herself with an offer to attend the University of Michigan. The wrench in the life plan sets the nuptials back, much to the chagrin of Violet's mother (Oscar-nominee Jacki Weaver), who pushes her daughter to tie the knot before all the grandparents are dead. The potential move doesn't sit well with Tom either — leaving San Fran means quitting a high profile cook job and saying goodbye to his best bud Alex (Chris Pratt) and Violet's sister Suzie (Alison Brie). But the compromise is eventually made, and Tom and Violet find themselves driving into the cold, snowy unknown of Michigan.
Five-Year Engagement maximizes Segel's and Blunt's inherent charisma (and, really, they're two of the gosh darn nicest on-screen people in recent years) by making them kind, loving and flawless. To give the movie a reason to exist, problems for their relationship are then randomly conjured up. Slowly but surely, their relationship suffers strain from all the bending over backwards. The archaic conceit of why these two actually need to get married to profess their love isn't really addressed — they just have to, and life is standing in their way. Tom can't find a cooking job; Violet's professor plays devil on her shoulder about marriage; Tom hates Michigan but turns out to be too nice to say anything; Violet sees shades of her psychological experiments ripping apart Tom's exterior. After meeting them in the beginning, the hurdles the central couple faces throughout their five year engagement are nonsensical. They're perfect for each other, they're just written to have rom-com problems.
The movie earns a few chuckles. Pratt and Brie steal the show as the friend and sister who quickly fall in love, tie the knot, have kids and foil Segel and Blunt's relationship. The two leads are comedically proficient too — a conversation between Blunt and Brie performed with Cookie Monster/Elmo voices is pure genius. But it's a movie of moments, diluted by a non-action arc that's simply a bore. Halfway through the movie, Segel's Tom goes full-on cartoon character, embracing a mountain man persona who's obsessed with venison and brewing his own honey mead. The jokes could work in another movie, but not in Five-Year Engagement, which strives for something more.
Time is essential to Five-Year Engagement, but it's unclear how many months have passed between the movie's scatterbrained scenes. Alex and Suzie visit Tom and Violet with kids, then magically they're all grown up when a year (maybe) has passed. And when did Tom go crazy? How quickly did they put their third marriage attempt together? The film's timeline is key, but never feels established — even with a run-time of over two hours. Much like Tom and Violet, the audience waits and waits and waits and waits for the couple to finally tie the knot in Five-Year Engagement. Tom Petty was right: the waiting is the hardest part.
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