Movie Review: "The Five Year Engagement"

I had heard about this movie, having seen a preview of it, and automatically assumed it was a chick flick. That, plus the seemingly steady flow of bad reviews, made me a little hesitant to see this movie. I kind of figured that it was a movie that could be seen once it came out on DVD, either perhaps a Redbox rental, as they say, or to borrow it from a friend, if any friend would get it.

But this was actually a pretty funny movie at times, and if you do not just view it as a comedy, pure and simple, but rather as a movie on relationships (but not one that takes itself too seriously), then it is not half bad.

There is a couple that seem happy and ideal for one another, on many levels. Tom, played by Jason Segel, and Violet, played by Emily Blunt, are happily together and engaged, living in San Fransisco and, by all accounts, living a seemingly ideal life. Tom is a cook on the rise, while Violet hopes to get a teaching position at Berkeley, although she has been turned down. It hurts her, but she still seems in relatively high spirits, and manages to more or less get this failure out of her mind. Everything seems perfectly normal and they are on course for a successful relationship, but at their engagement party, Violet's sister, Suzie, played by Alison Brie, meets Tom's loser friend and coworker Alex. It does not seem promising at first, and not much is made of it, until Suzie discovers she is pregnant with Alex's baby. So, this is the first event to kind of steal the thunder from Tom and Violet, and the first of many delays en route to a very long engagement, as the title suggests. For that matter, Suzie and Alex, who seem like a true odd couple destined to fail, actually prove to be surprisingly compatible, and they make it work. For most of the movie, they seem to possess that elusive something that makes a couple work, in comparison to Tom and Violet, who for various reasons, cannot seem to make the relationship work.

The unhappy couple's fortunes take a turn for the worse when Violet actually receives some seemingly good news in the mail: she gets accepted into a university program in Michigan, and her chance at teaching like she wanted to seems to be within her reach. But that would require the couple to be separated, or for Tom to sacrifice his life, with a promising career, in San Fransisco, and to pack his bags for Michigan, which he chooses to do. It is a sacrifice that he feels he is making for love, to make the relationship work. In fact, it is a huge mistake, and Michigan becomes a nightmare for him, and the seeming undoing of once happy relationship.

The relationship is tested in various ways for the rest of the movie, and the couple ultimately has to grow farther apart and ultimately end, and for each to get involved in new relationships that leave them unhappy in ways they hardly could have expected or predicted, for both Tom and Violet to truly appreciate what they once had. Yet, the miscommunication that lingers between the two seems to prevent their outright getting back together.

The ending was a little over the top. But it is a feel good movie, and so perhaps this is to be expected. All in all, not a bad movie. That said, unless you really want to go see this, it might be better to wait until you can rent or borrow this. Not an insult to the movie, but you don't absolutely have to rush out to see this one.