The Five-Year Engagement

The Five-Year Engagement has a similar problem as a half-dozen other films produced by Apatow: it is needlessly long and coarse. Like Funny People, for example, it pays a price for the raised expectation of madcap entertainment in which there will be a lot of funny lines and someone will humorously fling themselves down on the ground here and there. However, Nicholas Stoller and (co-screenwriter) Jason Segel had bigger ambitions; perhaps too big, given the barely innovated romantic-comedy format that they chose to work with. They decided to create the ultimate engagement comedy and, before the wedding itself (which, furthermore, is not in any way guaranteed to happen) to summarise not only the pre-wedding problems, but also the problems that come with lifelong cohabitation. Unlike in most mainstream romcoms, it is likable that the two protagonists behave like reasonable adults who think over their relationship problems and choose to talk about them instead of making unbelievably grand gestures (we’re breaking up now!). Stoller exhibits similar patience with his grasp of humour. The jokes are not superficial and are sometimes derived from the – in a certain sense – self-destructive use of montages. The romantic atmosphere in the rather somewhat ordinary scene of rolling in the snow is disrupted by a shot of a deer being killed. The occasional sacrifices to the god of base humour (a disgusting scene with food and other implicit and explicit sexual jokes) are thus doubly surprising. Nevertheless, I was not repelled by that to such a degree that I would lose my desire to watch the film and think about it a bit. What I found particularly interesting was the multiple reversals of “traditional” roles. The choice between career and work is not made by the man, but by a relatively emancipated woman, whose career growth and intellectual maturity her fiancé attempts to face through a total regression, a return to the primal human essence, i.e. hunting, in one of the most critical phases of their life together. Their journey to mutual understanding over the course of several years enables Tom and Violet to explore the countless forms of love and what could fittingly be described as a parody of love. However, the rules of the genre do not allow them to remain with substitute partners who give each of them what she/he has already/not yet received (intellect in her case; somewhat more superficially, beauty and youth in his case). In the end, the woman must, in a somewhat old-fashioned way, come to the realisation that relationships cannot be conceived of as social experiments; at the same time, however, she is the one who takes on the man’s role as the more creative of the two in the end. Some might defend The Five-Year Engagement by pointing out that it is just as clumsy and unfocused as interpersonal relationships, which is as weak an argument as the film’s attempt to encourage us to take a more serious view of the implementation of the “sociological” storyline with university experiments. Despite that, the film’s less defensible flaws do not in any way diminish the sincerity in the depiction of problems faced by people in a long-term engagement. The film carries a lot of ballast, but it contains even more truth. 75% (30/10/2012) (less) (more)