The Five-Year Engagement is the sort of movie that inspires wordplay in critics. With its title, that denotes a large chunk of time, and its pacing, which is borderline glacial, how can you not write a headline making fun of how long it feels? I’m not going to go as far as to write a bunch of puns about how The Five-Year Engagement makes you feel like you’ve been in the theater for all five of the years, or how it would have been better off as a two-year engagement, but I will speak a little bit about how the title goes a long way toward ruining the pacing of the film.
As you might have guessed, this is a story about a man and a woman who fall in love and get engaged. The wrinkle in their otherwise happy tale springs from the fact that their marriage keeps getting put off due to their chosen careers conflicting with one another. Tom (Jason Segel) is a chef, who wants to run a trendy restaurant in San Francisco, while Violet (Emily Blunt) is an academic, whose career path takes her to Michigan. There are no fancy restaurants in Michigan (at least in this universe), so things get put on hold. Over and over again.
The problem with the name The Five-Year Engagement is that it assures us their struggles last for five years before they reach any sort of conclusion. Not only is that a lot of struggles to get through, period, it’s also a lot of struggles that end up feeling meaningless. The problems that the couple try to face in year five? Yeah, they play as kind of important. But all of the problems that they go through during years one through four? All of the times that you’re asked to wonder whether they’re finally going to get married or if this is the problem that’s going to break them up for good before that fifth year? They play as unimportant. They play as filler. And seeing as this movie has a long-for-a-romantic-comedy runtime of two hours and four minutes, that makes for a lot of time wasted. The problem with The Five-Year Engagement is that it’s too long, and since most of what you’re watching doesn’t matter, it moves way too slow.
The long grind of getting through the drama wouldn’t be so bad if the movie was able to provide a bunch of big laughs along the way; but that’s not the sort of humor that co-writers Segel and Nicholas Stoller are going for here. The humor in this movie is the humor of awkward interactions, of social cues being ignored and awkward pauses interrupting weird conversations. It’s the kind of stuff that makes you smirk, or chuckle to yourself a bit, but not the kind of stuff that makes you cackle. I laughed enough throughout this movie that I would say it’s a success, comedically, but with the slow, punishing grind of all the drama—I have to be honest—I was hoping for some cackles.
The only time the film goes big and broad, it’s not so much for laughs, but to exaggerate the drama of how bad things have gotten for the couple. After a few years in the frozen tundra of Michigan, Tom starts to lose his mind a bit. He’s grown big, gross mutton chops, he goes crossbow hunting, fills his home with things made out of deer carcasses, and loses seemingly all social skills. It all felt pretty extreme, and it seemed to me like a character bit that could have been established just by showing a couple scenes of Tom moping around his place, with nothing to do. A less involved approach to Tom’s angst would have eaten up less screen time as well, and for a movie whose first two acts are long, slow, and without any real stakes, cutting down on anything that wasn’t completely necessary would have been a big help.
All of this gloom and doom sounds like it’s adding up to a terrible movie, but The Five-Year Engagement has one huge trick up its sleeve; its cast. In addition to Segel and Blunt playing the main characters, this movie also features Chris Pratt (Parks and Recreation) and Alison Brie (Community) playing their best friend/sister, and there’s probably never been an onscreen foursome that I’ve had a bigger, more complete crush on. All four of these actors have talent, charm, and acting chops coming out of their ears, and I could watch them all do essentially anything from here to eternity. While this movie moves slow, and doesn’t go for any really big laughs, it was still a pleasant experience just because its main cast is made up of gorgeous, awesome people. And the embarrassment of casting riches doesn’t stop there. Even the smaller roles are filled by lovable folk like Kevin Hart, Rhys Ifans, and Brian Posehn; those guys are practically human Muppets.
Which, to be fair, reminds me of one big laugh that the movie managed to give me: the debate about life between Cookie Monster and Elmo. It’s a bit that made me fall even more in love with Emily Blunt and Alison Brie than I was already. And, now that I think about it, I was kind of dying during the engagement party scene, when Pratt tries to court a lady. That guy plays clueless like nobody else. Then you have Segel, who’s so good at projecting pain and vulnerability, no matter what he’s doing, that it affords the film the luxury of never having to go to melodramatic places in order to get us engaged in his and Blunt’s relationship. This guy is maybe the best romantic comedy lead we’ve had in decades. Without these players bringing the characters to life, The Five-Year Engagement would have been a painful endurance test. With them, it’s pleasant enough, but disappointing. Whether the blame for that lays at the feet of Segel, Stoller, or Stoller’s editors (William Kerr and Peck Prior) is debatable, but what’s less debatable is that this movie feels mostly like a missed opportunity.
