The Five-Year Engagement (2012)

Comedies are pretty strong these days. They’re not perfect, of course, but even the weaker ones seem to have some really funny people working on them. Most would agree that the man most responsible for this resurgence of respectable comedy is Judd Apatow, and his brand of conversational, crude-yet-heartfelt R-rated comedy has been dominating the landscape ever since the release of his The 40-Year-Old Virgin back in 2005. Even movies with which he is not associated seem to be aping his style, but some (see: A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy) tend to know the words and not the music. The people behind The Five-Year Engagement, the latest Judd Apatow production, are certainly more familiar with the music, but it takes the genre’s easygoing nature and pushes it to the extreme. Sometimes the difference between a good comedy and a great comedy is the decision to leave the fat on the cutting room floor. The Five-Year Engagement throws everything at you—beef, fat, side dishes and all—and the result feels like a potentially strong comedy that still needs a few runs through the editing room. It’s entertaining, but strangely exhausting.

The eponymous engagement is between Tom (Jason Segel) and Violet (Emily Blunt). The former is a San Francisco chef close to running his own restaurant. The latter is an academic looking to get a position at a reputable university. When Violet gets into the University of Michigan (insert snarky pro-Ohio State remark here), the two decide to trek up to Ann Arbor for a couple years. This means Tom must leave his up-and-coming career and start over as a deli worker while Violet skyrockets up the psychology grad student ladder. This creates something of a rut in their relationship, and they continue to delay their wedding until they can find solid ground. Their relationship is contrasted with the more unconventional marriage of their friends Alex (Chris Pratt) and Suzie (Alison Brie), and another conflict is thrown into the mix when Violet’s boss Winton (Rhys Ifans) starts to take things a little too far.

Segel also co-wrote The Five-Year Engagement with director Nicholas Stoller, and the two of them previously explored the waters of problematic relationships with 2008’s terrific Forgetting Sarah Marshall. In a way, this film is a more ambitious project that looks to explore the conflicts that most serious relationships will inevitably face, but that is occasionally undermined by Stoller’s tendency to let the film meander far more than it should. My issue is not wholly with the film’s length—a movie can be as long as it wants so long as it’s good—but with the awkward moments of loosey-goosey dialogue that is trying to milk one more laugh out of the whole ordeal. However, laughs only come when a moment feels like it has any reason to exist. The Five-Year Engagement wouldn’t necessarily have been improved with the outright removal of several scenes, but rather by cutting out a few extraneous moments here and there. Unless the joke is great, it’s rarely a good idea to sacrifice forward momentum just to get it in there. In that case, the audience will start to grow impatient.

This is not just a flaw I found in this movie, but more and more it seems like comedies are relying too much on the cast’s affability and are giving them rather slight material. The aforementioned A Good Old Fashioned Orgy was the worst example of this, but it seems to me more and more of these comedies are just letting the camera roll while the actors are being funny. This isn’t really the case with the whole of The Five-Year Engagement, but rather with a handful of minor scenes. Segel and Stoller are getting at some interesting ideas, and the cast makes it work more often than not, but these moments can be hampered by the apparent need to shoehorn in jokes that feel improvised and not entirely at home. There are so many laughs in this movie that feel organic that the forced ones are all the more glaring.

I say all this because I have a great affection for the heart of The Five-Year Engagement and the various aspects of the relationships that it is trying to explore. I also love everything about Segel and Blunt, who have tremendous chemistry and make for a convincing and fun couple. As far as their relationship is concerned, everything rings true. Inevitably, the entire film leads up to a rather conventional climax, but the likability of everyone involved continues to shine through. This just makes the shoddiness of the whole affair all the more frustrating. These are great characters, and the film uses them to give us moments of genuine humor and insight. The problems can be found in between these moments, and therein lies a whole lot of dead air.

Grade: B-