The Five-Year Engagement – review

By Naylii Sophea

The movie deploys an odd-couple pairing: beefy, goofy, well-meaning Segel with elegant, wand-thin Emily Blunt. As in Seth Rogen's Knocked Up, there's some authorial wish-fulfilment in the heavy-set funny guy getting the beautiful girl. But it's artlessly persuasive, and the film certainly succeeds in swathing the audience with the romcomfort blanket, yet at the same time giving us gags, and also a sense that the story should happen in a place vaguely resembling the real world, populated by people with something like real problems. Kind of.

Segel is Tom, an up-and-coming chef in San Francisco; for a year he has been dating Violet, played by Emily Blunt, a British research student in experimental psychology, who is angling for a postdoctoral position at UCLA. When Tom proposes, the movie treats the couple to a proposes, the movie treats the couple to an uproariously Curtisian "engagement party", an invention with which Stoller and Segel can cleverly frontload their film with quasi-wedding-scene gags about embarrassing in-laws, while leaving the marriage question unresolved. The happy couple are highly disconcerted by a scenario their own nuptials have brought into being: at the party, Tom's laddish best man Alex (Chris Pratt) puts the moves on Violet's equally posh sister Suzie, played with what seemed to me a very good English accent by Alison Brie (Pete Campbell's wife Trudy in TV's Mad Men).

This situation plants the first tiny seed of self-doubt and self-consciousness in their minds. When Violet is offered a two-year appointment in far-off Michigan, Tom gallantly agrees to put his own career on hold and delay their own wedding plans while they're out there. But there's no call for fancy chefs in this snowy, parochial place, and Violet's career blossoms under the unsettling care of her charismatic professor, played by Rhys Ifans. 

Blunt and Segel work together very nicely, but the downside is that when they are apart, the film loses a bit of fizz: their separate lives are quite as contrived and absurd, but quite not so funny and interesting. But the course of romcom, like that of true love, can't be expected to run smooth – and we can't afford to be snobby about very good mainstream entertainment.