WEDDING BELL BLUES: a review of "The Five-Year Engagement"

“THE FIVE-YEAR ENGAGEMENT”

A Judd Apatow Production

Screenplay Written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller

Directed by Nicholas Stoller

*** ½ (three and a half stars)

The night that I became engaged was emotionally monumental as well as beautifully simple.

My then girlfriend, after driving through a horrific blizzard from Wisconsin to the southern suburbs of Illinois, arrived to visit me for a couple of days at my parent’s house over winter’s break just before New Year’s Eve in 1990. We had been dating for nine months, had professed our love for each other and as far as I am concerned, kept surprising myself at how one could essentially find one’s love for another grow deeper, as if the act of falling in love was an unfinished process. Although I had not seen her for perhaps a week to a week and a half, when I saw her at the side door of my parent’s house ringing the doorbell, it felt as if I had not seen her for one year. Everything about her felt so fresh yet so familiar and within mere moments of her entering my parent’s house, our romance was rekindled. On New Year’s Eve, as we sat in the basement watching something or another and with a small, smuggled bottle of alcohol in tow, she asked me if I wanted to get married. I instantly said, “Yes!” One moment, we were boyfriend/girlfriend, the very next moment, we became engaged. It was something I had absolutely never thought would ever happen to me yet I had always hoped.

The process of our engagement lasted much longer than I had ever anticipated. While we never set a wedding date initially, had no firm plans of any sort, and even did not have any engagement rings as of yet, we just knew that we were promised to one another. After graduating from college, I remained in Madison, WI and moved in with her, much to the extreme chagrin of my parents. And on the very first night of our cohabitation, we had an epic fight. What it was about I honestly cannot remember but what I do remember is feeling terrified that an experience we had not shared at all, even after dating and being inseparable for slightly over one year, could occur so immediately. I worried that it was a dark sign for things to come.

By late summer, we had found our first address, an apartment we shared for five years during which we experienced the tremendous growing pains of learning how to be in a relationship and live as a couple. We had mastered falling in love but we had to figure out how to stay in love. We graduated from the first apartment into our second one, adopted our first cat, navigated through our professional lives, loved each other, fought with each other, hurt each other, and loved each other again all the while remaining engaged with no firm plans of how and when we would become married. Over the course of that period, we talked about our plans, began them and due to some serious soul searching on her part, plans would fizzle and fall through. 

After living together for seven years, I began to question what our relationship was all about and where it would progress, if at all. My desire to marry her had never faded but I had to begin questioning that if my desires and her desires remained the same. So, while driving across town sometime in the winter of 1997, she turned to me and asked, completely out of the blue, “So, how do you feel about getting married?” She said it with a soft smile and somehow, I knew that this time, after two failed previous attempts, would possibly be very different. It was and we were finally married in 1998, on the anniversary of our very first date in 1990.       

Seeing “The Five-Year Engagement,” the latest and very strong yet subtle and subversive new offering from the creative team of Producer Judd Apatow, Co-Writer/Actor Jason Segel and Co-Writer/Director Nicholas Stoller, the forces behind the terrific “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” (2009), stirred up a host of memories and emotions cemented in my romantic past and current marital status. It is a funny film, of course, but also a perceptively wise one and one that is also proudly unafraid to delve into darker romantic waters, especially during our current frothy state of so-called romantic comedies. 

Now, dear readers, I have spilled more than enough digital ink rallying against the current creative status of the 21^st century romantic comedy film and I will try my best to not and rehash old wounds at length all over again. Yet, after this film, I feel compelled to offer some plea to anyone who will potentially listen to me. That when making a romantic comedy to please, please, please try to offer a work that does not insult the audience’s intelligence by flogging us all with wacky plots and prefabricated notions of love and romance. Time and again, film after film, Apatow and his creative cohorts have consistently understood how to make their romantic comedies work successfully by grounding the proceedings in a firm sense of reality thus ensuring the comedy is legitimately funny and the sex and romance feels honest. “The Five-Year Engagement” is refreshingly honest.

Jason Segel and Emily Blunt star as Tom Solomon and Violet Barnes, a San Francisco couple who become engaged during the lovely opening sequences of the film on the rooftop of the restaurant where Tom is employed as a sous chef. As the twosome first begin to plan their wedding, Violet is given the opportunity of her lifetime as she is asked to join the Psychology Department research team at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for a period of two years. Tom affably agrees to postpone their wedding plans, turn down a prized career move as the head chef of a new restaurant and move to Michigan with Violet. Yet, what seems to be a fine idea at first becomes one filled with more wedding postponements as Violet’s career continues to advance while Tom’s stalls and spins its wheels causing him to fall into a despair of unfulfilled dreams, deep hurts and doubts. Over the course of the following five years, Tom and Violet comedically and painfully navigate their lives and romance as they potentially make their way to the altar.  

Now, to many of you, “The Five-Year Engagement” may not sound to be like the type of romantic comedy candyfloss that is the norm and perhaps, some of that reality may not be for you. As I have stated many times, I completely understand that many of you would just like to go to the movies, shut off your brains and just be awash with that candyfloss fantasy, leaving all signs of real world issues at the theater door. Believe me, I like that just as much as you as what I would desire more than anything is to be entertained. Many of my favorite movies of all time happen to be ones where the real world is gleefully left behind. But, what I cannot stand is when the candyfloss and fantasy of films that approximate the relationships and behaviors of the real world arrives at the complete expense of reality. I loathe romantic comedies consumed with oh-so wacky plots filled with characters and situations that would never happen any where in any conceivable world. Nicholas Stoller’s “The Five-Year Engagement” is indeed a funny film but even then it is not in a mass appeal crowd pleasing way. The film descends down some very realistic dark roads, making the experience for me a much sadder affair, one that defiantly moves against the grain of mass appeal modern day romantic comedies. It is indeed a risky move, and I applaud Stoller, Segel and Apatow for confidently deciding to not sacrifice what’s true for the sake of candyfloss and fantasy.

I think Stoller has accomplished this feat in a very clever way. First, he woos the audience weaned on current romantic comedies with a lovely engagement sequence, which is intercut with Tom and Violet’s cute first meeting at a superhero costume party. And then, Tom and Violet experience many rocky romantic roads in a fashion as how I would imagine that it is for most couples when the dream of romance gives way to the reality of romance. Ultimately, I feel what Stoller has achieved is a romantic comedy more in the vein of something like Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” (1977) or Albert Brooks’ “Modern Romance” (1981). Something more melancholy, painful, aching (and brilliantly set to a collection of Van Morrison selections) and again, a film that is more honest, therefore making it a rarity. “The Five-Year Engagement,” is about two individuals struggling to determine and maintain their respective individuality while existing as two halves of a couple. It is a film about falling in love and mostly, staying in love.

Jason Segel and Emily Blunt make for a wonderful pair to not only root for but, most importantly, to understand. Segel, as with his performance in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” is undeniably fearless by shedding any sense of male vanity to fully explore the fragility and crumbling of the male ego, an act that provides much of the film’s sharp humor especially as he becomes more despondent when his misery in Michigan and resentment towards Violet grows. As Violet, Blunt elicits tremendous charm and intelligence, making her professional ascent believable and realistically and simultaneously compelling and conflicting as she knows fully well how awful Tom feels and how much he sacrificed just remain with her. 

With the love story of Tom and Violet, Stoller performs a terrific job of depicting the precarious nature of romantic relationships to the point where some scenes are bound to cause some discomfort for those audience members who did indeed desire to leave reality waiting in the lobby. I loved how Stoller shows how tense late night bedroom talks can suddenly explode into epic fights detailing the entire existence of a relationship. How a phone call intended with such tenderness can instantly become filled with rancor. How one can love and at times, feel such hatred for one’s partner from moment to moment. Stoller and Segel’s screenplay is minutely in tune with a relationship’s life cycle and the process of give and take contained therein. Best of all, Segal and Blunt possess such great chemistry that they give us a couple that feels not only deeply in love but one that is richly lived in. They never feel as if they just met on the set moments before the cameras began rolling.

As with many of Judd Apatow’s own films and productions, the criticism has arrived that perhaps “The Five-Year Engagement,” which runs a hair over two hours, is a tad too long. For that criticism, I whole-heartedly disagree as Stoller and Segel have done their best to create a full world for their characters to inhabit. There is terrific supporting work from Chris Pratt as Tom’s vulgar culinary best friend Alex as well as great work from the adorable Alison Brie as Violet’s sister Suzie. I really enjoyed the amount of time spent in the University Psychology department with Violet’s goofy research team (Mindy Kaling, Randall Park and Kevin Hart), who are all under the leadership of Professor Winton Childs (a very effective Rhys Ifans). All of those scenes allowed Stoller to include some good, pointed satire about the world of academia and the Midwestern university community. Of course, not absolutely everything works in the film, but that’s OK. With those characters and others, the world of “The Five-Year Engagement” felt complete, lived in and with all of the messy, undisciplined material and people that surround us within our real lives. Again, we have a film that despite some wild moments involving deer hunting, the dangers and consequences of Midwestern frostbite and some truly scary and depression motivated facial hair growth, all feels very true instead of feeling too streamlined and ultimately plastic.

I have been with my wife for a total of 22 years and we have been married for 14. It amazes me when I actually take the time and think about the years we have spent together and wrap my head around the fact that we have spent half of our lives together. The hard work involved with tending to and attempting to maintain a relationship has not been lost upon either of us, yet all has not been sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. In the ebb and flow of marriage, there have been, and still remain, periods where things tend to ebb much more than flow and yet, we are still here. I loved that “The Five-Year Engagement” is precisely a love story that taps into those precise emotions and that makes this a story that deserves telling. One where love is not so easily tamed and handled, no matter how much one loves the other. One where the individual struggles of creating one’s place in the professional world impacts one’s sense of self and the relationships they are connected with. One where a heartfelt compromise can unfortunately produce wrenching personal and professional consequences and feelings of failure. It is a film where the love story is indeed more hard fought than we typically see and I felt made “The Five-Year Engagement” a deeper, richer experience than it had to be. I loved the attention and effort given to this story and characters very much and once again, I cannot express enough how much I treasure the work of Judd Apatow and his band of merry collaborators because when they are working at their best, they realize that just being funny is not always enough. There can always be more! As a viewer, I appreciate the willingness they have to probe and mine for more, making the experience one that can fully resonate and one rich enough to return to.

While "The Five-Year Engagement" is not meant for everyone, I do wish that mass audiences will give it enough of a chance where that any potential success could just maybe force those Hollywood powers that be to eschew those wacky plots and just find the humor and heartbreak of relationships that we can all relate to.