The Five-Year Engagement: Delightful

The Five-Year Engagement reverses the common narrative in which the girl quits her job to follow her boyfriend/fiancé. While the film starts out in a rather predictable and fluffy way, the plot and characters really come to life as the conflict intensifies. It’s a delightful hybrid between romantic comedy and mid-life crisis drama.

Tom (Jason Segel) proposes to his girlfriend, Violet (Emily Blunt), on their first year anniversary. Everything is so hunky-dory at first. They happen to be the cutest and most functional couple in San Francisco. Tom is a successful culinary chef at an upscale restaurant, and Violet is hoping to work as a post-doctorate at UC Berkeley.  On the other hand, Tom’s immature best friend Alex (Chris Pratt) impregnates and then marries Violet’s younger sister Suzie (Alison Brie). While Alex and Suzie inadvertently plunge into marriage, Tom and Violet take five years to get there.

As in most romantic comedies, everything goes terribly wrong. After getting rejected from Berkeley, she gets accepted into University of Michigan’s post-doctorate program in psychology. Recognizing that this is a huge opportunity for Violet, Tom leaves his job to move with her. Unfortunately, he can’t find work besides making sandwiches at the local burger joint.

While he wastes his culinary talents, Violet leads a “groundbreaking” psychological experiment—she studies the emotional deficiencies of people who choose to eat stale donuts instead of waiting for fresh ones. Holed up in the world of academia, she overlooks her fiancé’s plight. With a job that he takes no pride in, Tom tries to overcompensate for his sense of emasculation by hunting deer and growing a Neanderthal beard. Apparently, this is how male homemakers in Michigan cope with their feelings of inadequacy. As he continually suppresses his anger and lack of fulfillment, he grows schlubbier and more pathetic.

But Tom’s not completely in the right either. Instead of proactively rectifying his situation, he wallows in his pity and resentment, attributing all his misery to Violet’s career-centered worldview. As expected, they grow further apart and hurt one another.

Tom’s transformation from clean-shaven sous-chef to macho man to pathetic schlub was surprisingly realistic and heart-wrenching, despite the melodrama of it all. And I also empathized with Violet because she truly feels caught in the middle between her career and the love of her life. Like many ambitious women of this century, she overthinks the issue to the point of in-action and paralysis. Both characters are portrayed as flawed, realistic, and vulnerable. Their characters are equally well developed and lifelike.

And of course, the film portrays it in such a way that these two almost need to undergo such trials and tribulations in order to built a more compassionate and empathetic relationship. At the beginning, they were still enjoying their honeymoon phase. Their relationship was a lot more one-dimensional because they hadn’t witnessed the darker sides of one another.

When the movie first started, I noticed how incredibly awkward and stilted the dialogue and especially the secondary characters were. Interestingly enough, once the main couple hits crises in their relationship, everyone else seems a lot more functional and natural, and their relationship becomes the most cringeworthy part of the film. So if they were trying to establish that dichotomy, this was meaningful and successful. If not, they may have just gotten lucky in solidifying dialogue and developing the characters by the end of the production. 

The movie is on the longer side, and in some way, this reflects their interminably long journey with multiple setbacks. Certain scenes, in which Tom’s boss cuts her finger or Violet’s co-workers suggest creepy experiments, could have been excised. The film editors may have been too nice in allowing each minor character deliver five minute rants. But the thing is, you don’t really need that when you already have such a charismatic main couple, because we care really only about them.

It’s also refreshing to see a main couple with really good chemistry. Both Segel and Blunt do a terrific job to the point of making me care about their characters and overlook several shortcomings of this film. The supporting actors are very good as well, including Rhys Ifans as the sleazy professor who takes too much interest in Violet’s personal life (and we know where that ends up.) I think they compensate for the film’s predictable and formulaic moments.

Unlike some of Judd Apatow’s films, “The Five-Year Engagement” sparingly uses raunchy humor. This may help the film appeal to a wider audience. While it does feature some explicit sexuality and profanity, they usually serve some purpose in the overarching narrative. This movie may be a nice choice for couples’ date night.