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Tuesday, April 24, 2012

MOVIE REVIEW
The Five-Year Engagement
Before "I Do": Four Funerals And A Wedding


Emily Blunt as Violet and Jason Segel as Tom in "The Five-Year Engagement".  Glen Wilson/Universal Pictures
    
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        FOLLOW                                            TWEET
Tuesday, April 24, 2012

You can't blame these souls for leaving their hearts in San Francisco, and throughout Nicholas Stoller's "The Five-Year Engagement", you sense that the City By The Bay is beckoning them.  In this Judd Apatow co-produced comedy a year after meeting at a costume party Tom (Jason Segel) and Violet (Emily Blunt) get engaged by the moonlit night of San Francisco's Bay Bridge and Embarcadero.  Things are looking good.

For Violet, a psychology graduate, a Berkeley scholarship for teaching seems likely but instead Michigan beckons.  Violet transitions to colder climes as a grad teacher and Tom, a top chef at a San Francisco restaurant, gives up his job to help his fiancé realize her dreams.  He takes a lower paying job.  He isn't happy, but he bears both it and Violet's mentor (Rhys Ifans), who has ulterior motives.  Surrounded by awkward friends who have a shotgun wedding, Violet and Tom find themselves still unmarried, prodded and pressured by their parents and grandparents, with some of the latter dropping like flies in a punch line that comes close to running stale.

In a field of utterly brainless romantic comedies in Hollywood there have been some standouts ("crazy, stupid, love."), and while "The Five-Year Engagement", full of characters in both Tom and Violet's work lives, isn't exactly stand-out material, it is a whole lot better than many of the recent films of its genre, and manages to entertain deep into its second hour.  Mr. Segel does well as the anguished Tom, and occasionally Mr. Stoller (whom with his male lead star wrote the film -- gets to cut underneath this film's surface, allowing Tom and Violet to dalliance in messy waters of temptation, some of it unexpectedly visceral and uncomfortable. 

The twists and turns of these two independent people are accompanied by some awkward gallows humor but "The Five-Year Engagement" which features a versatile Emily Blunt effortlessly at home in a mainstream American comedy, is hardly a disappointment.  The film, populated with a diverse cast that includes Kevin Hart ("Think Like A Man", "35 And Ticking") and Mindy Kaling ("No Strings Attached"), is full of color and life but also packed with drab, cold and harsh moments.  Mr. Hart is given his day in the sun, and his energy and enthusiasm keeps the film from running off the rails.

"The Five-Year Engagement" has big ambitions, fulfilling some of them and narrowly missing the target on others but the film's heart, enterprise and landscape, full of picturesque views of the city I love and live in, wins you over, and not for lack of trying.

With: Chris Pratt, Alison Brie, Jacki Weaver, Lauren Weedman, Mimi Kennedy, David Paymer, Randall Park, Dakota Johnson.

"The Five-Year Engagement" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association Of America for sexual content and language throughout.  The film's running time is two hours and four minutes.

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