Jason Segel and Emily Blunt are Tom and Violet in The Five Year Engagement.
Tom and Violet are madly in love and they're going to get married.
Well, not so fast. This is territory that comes with complications. So Violet gets a new job in the academic world, they both have to move to Michigan, Tom is disgruntled at the sacrifices he has to make, and blah, blah, blah. The wedding is postponed and then postponed again. The relationship waxes and wanes.
As relationships do.
Jason Segel and Emily Blunt are Tom and Violet, and The Five Year Engagement is all about their courtship and their relationship. The actors really carry this one on sheer force of charisma, as the movie, at over two hours long, is almost as self-indulgent as an actual wedding.
If, for example, a lengthy courtship means granny dies of old age waiting patiently for the nuptials, why stop with one old person? It's a great sight gag, and you could squeeze a quartet of oldsters dying into that time frame.
On the other hand, there's a level of comic madness to this film that's irresistible.
Whenever Tom and Violet and their relationship get a bit dull, various characters turn up to run away with the story, and in a good way: Chris Pratt, as Tom's idiot co-worker; Rhys Ifans as Violet's professor boss; Dakota Johnson as a younger woman who catches Tom's eye.
Filmmaker Nicholas Stoller takes his story into crazyland with these characters a few times, and the results are hilarious. There are some killer laughs here.
The Five Year Engagement is uneven but mostly funny, and the writing (by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, same team behind The Muppets and Get Him To The Greek) is often inspired. In the tough world o' romantic comedy, it doesn't get much better than that.
