Running Time: 2 hours, 4 minutes
Rating: R
Director: Nick Stoller
Quick Impressions:
Our screening of The Five-Year Engagement began with a trippy, mysterious Yellow Submarine trailer that aired just before the “no texting, no calls” announcement. I call it mysterious because I have no idea what it meant. It appeared to be just a remastered version of what looked like the original trailer, and by the end, I was like, “You’re right, mystery preview. Yellow Submarine looks awesome and much better than anything that’s come out recently. I’m totally excited to see it on the big screen.” But then it just ended with no explanation as to why it had aired. Is Yellow Submarine coming back to theaters for a limited engagement? Is it coming to bluray? Is somebody making a documentary about it? Are Cinemark theaters now airing one “classic” preview before the start of their normal previews? ???
Huh. In retrospect, I now realize that the foretaste of Yellow Submarine had clearly been planted to prepare us for the trippy midsection of our feature. I really liked The Five-Year Engagement, but I swear, there’s a long stretch there towards in the middle that really feels like a dream sequence. When it turns out to be reality, you have to wonder if Jason Segel and Nick Stoller wrote that part of the screenplay while under the influence of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
Apart from this abrupt shift into Tom’s over-the-top mental breakdown, The Five-Year Engagement is a really good movie. Granted, even though it actually clocks in at just a bit over two hours, it feels a little long. (Someone should point out to them that when nature documentaries cover a subject for five years, they often use time lapse photography.) Still, there are several laugh-out-loud moments in a pretty solid story that offers likable, broadly realistic characters, a fantastic cast, and (seemingly) a part for anyone who has ever appeared in a sitcom on NBC.
The Good:
I always like Jason Segel, and I love Emily Blunt, so a movie full of them is easy to watch, even though at times it needs to pick up the pace. The Five-Year Engagement delivers lots of things you’d expect—i.e., Jason Segel with his pants off—and a few genuine surprises—i.e., you only actually see his butt this time.
Some of the supporting performances, however, are truly phenomenal. I thought that Violet’s mother was so amazing, and I kept racking my brain trying to place the actress’s face. (Sadly, I was running through the largely British casts of my mother’s Poirot and Marple movies, when, actually, as the end credits finally enlightened me, the actress was Jackie Weaver, the Australian Academy Award nominee for Animal Kingdom a couple of years ago.) As soon as I saw that, I thought, “Oh yeah, the evil grandma. What was her name? Cougar? Nah. She-Beast? No, something sweeter. Labradoodle?” Finally in the shower last night, it came to me. Smurf! (I wasn’t inspired by anything in the shower, by the way. That’s just when I remembered the name.) Anyway, Jackie Weaver may have been Oscar nominated for Animal Kingdom, but I actually think I liked her performance in this film more.
And Rhys Ifans, wow! That was revelatory for me. I’m so used to see him playing a goof-ball weirdo (like in Notting Hill and Harry Potter). I’ve always thought he was a fine actor, but I was particularly impressed by his dignified, at moments even kind of sexy performance as psychology professor Winton Childs. Granted, Ifans is still playing an oddball, but he’s doing it with such restrained dignity. (This is just another of many small things making me hope that this year’s new Spiderman movie will be as good as the cast and not as bad as the idea to reboot the franchise so soon.)
Alison Brie and Chris Pratt are also pretty fantastic as Suzie and Alex, presumably well written characters made even funnier in performance. (They’re such wonderful foils for Tom and Violet, the pair who struggle to do everything the right way only to sink into increasing disaster while Suzie and Alex act entirely on impulse and seem to wind up with the superior life.)
The entire psychology post doc group was funny, too, though, of them, Mindy Kalling’s character seemed the most showcased. Playing Tom’s colleague Tarquin, Brian Posehn was also pretty great. I, personally, haven’t seen him much since Just Shoot Me, so his presence was a delightful surprise to me.
Another real strength of the film is that the conflict the protagonists experience isn’t anything too petty or too contrived. They have a genuine problem that many couples face. As a woman who was once in academia, I definitely identified with the dilemma faced by Tom and Violet. When both members of a couple have successful, promising careers, usually one or both of them will have to make some significant sacrifices to make the relationship work. I thought the way all this played out seemed extremely realistic and realistically frustrating since good intentions don’t always lead to the best choices. (Sometimes, there are no best choices.)
Funniest Moment:
Most of the jokes in this landed, and even though we saw it on a Tuesday night with about four other couples in a huge auditorium, there was lots of laughter in the theater.
Probably the movie’s most unexpected treat comes near the end. By then, you’re so close to the finish that you think that most of the best parts must be behind you.
But you’re not expecting the fantastically funny debate between Cookie Monster and Elmo, which gets increasingly amusing (especially Cookie’s sotto voice cursing and Elmo’s final apology).
Best Joke:
I really liked the idea for an experiment that Ming (Randall Park) puts forward during the brainstorming session/initiation of Violet. When it comes up again, it’s pretty amusing, too.
Best Action Sequence:
The “fight” that never exactly happens between Tom and Winton is pretty exciting to watch.
Best Scene:
Actually, even though I thought that in general, the first hour or so of the movie is by far the strongest part (or the funniest, anyway), I think I liked the last scene best. It had a wonderful, spontaneous energy and seemed like a fitting finish.
The Negatives:
I’m confused about Violet’s reaction to Brian’s (played by Kevin Hart) suggestion about why she was offered a tenure track job. For a psychology professor particularly, she seems stunningly naïve. For one thing, anyone who looks like Emily Blunt and comes up with ideas like a stale doughnut experiment should not be so surprised to find out the information that she does. (I don’t mean to bash the experiment unduly. It really is a good adult version of the marshmallow thing, but the conclusions she draws are pretty off-the-wall.) For another, she overreacts completely. I really don’t think that things are as rotten in the state of Denmark as her bafflingly shocked tirade seems to imply. In academia—as in any other profession—who you know and how well you work with others are factors just as important as the quality of your work. If she were a complete idiot lacking qualifications for the job, that would be one thing. But all of the people she’s working with are qualified and capable, and so is she. You can’t fit four or five people into one tenure track position. For a character obsessed with psychology, Violet has a truly embarrassing lack of insight about herself, her life, her relationships, her motivations. (I don’t want to give any spoilers, but seriously, at the stage where she initiates a confrontation scene, how did she not think that her personal life was at least somewhat of a factor in the decision?) I don’t think that any of that is quite as nefarious as Violet seems to. Of course, maybe she’s just mad because she realizes she threw out a perfectly good box of old doughnuts.
The other thing (and I keep saying this) is that the movie is too long, and the jump into Tom’s mental breakdown seems too abrupt and strange. As Tom and Violet had a bizarre dinner with Suzie and Alex, I really thought we were witnessing Tom’s nightmare, a vision of his fears about what would become of him if he stayed in Michigan longer.
Overall:
The Five-Year Engagement is funny (like, actually drawing laughter from the audience funny), and not everybody will be laughing at the same stuff because it draws on different kinds of humor. The cast is packed full of comedians. Now, you won’t laugh every minute, and there is a long stretch in the middle that feels too prolonged and also sort of surreal. Still, the characters are pretty likable, the acting is good, and the conflict the protagonists struggle to work through actually makes sense and seems real. I sometimes think that Princess Di makes a better super hero than Violet makes a psychologist, but then, Princess Di is a tough act to follow.