‘The Five-Year Engagement’ is Long but Charming

Nicholas Stoller’s romantic comedy The Five-Year Engagement is proof that you can actually overuse montage as a film technique. For those unfamiliar, 80s comedies like Revenge of the Nerds and One Crazy Summer popularized this storytelling method, making construction projects seem like a snap. Montages could successfully show days, weeks, or months passing by in a movie, while only using a few minutes of screen time.

Since the 80s, many films have effectively leveraged the montage to accomplish this goal, including The Five-Year Engagement. However Stoller’s film proves to us, that it’s possible to have too much of a good thing.

The movie introduces us to Tom (Jason Segel) and Violet (Emily Blunt), two young career-driven people who are crazy about each other. Tom hopes to become the head chef at a prestigious restaurant, and Violet aspires to a research career in academia. Their relationship isn’t perfect, but their strong love pushes them to get engaged.

Tom and Violet start to plan their nuptials; however the wedding gets derailed when a job opportunity comes up for Violet. As a progressive male, Tom agrees to leave behind life in San Francisco, so that Violet can pursue a position at the University of Michigan. Once he arrives in Ann Arbor though, crummy weather and weak career prospects cause Tom to sink into a resentful, depressed rut which threatens to tear their relationship apart.

It makes sense why Stoller would need montages; he is tasked with showing a couple’s trials over the five years that they are engaged. The primary reason he ends up overusing them though, is the film’s bloated runtime. Of the 124 minutes that Stoller co-wrote with star Jason Segel, at least 15 could be chopped to make The Five-Year Engagement much tighter. Without this excess weight, the inevitable conflict that drives the lovers apart would be sharper, and their eventual reunion would become more satisfying.

Aside from the annoying length, The Five-Year Engagement is a charming comedy that blends slapstick, raunchy, awkward and dark humor. Characters sustain amusing yet brutal physical injuries such as an arrow to the leg and a lost toe. Like Stoller and Segel’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall there’s male nudity, though thankfully in this movie you see more of Segel’s backside than his front. You also get a hilarious moment involving a faked male climax. Family members comically make Tom and Violet uncomfortable at functions and during wedding planning. Perhaps the most twisted laughs however come from death, which is used as a comedic device. The length of time it takes for Tom and Violet to marry becomes so ridiculously long, that multiple relatives die off in the interim.

Even though this movie centers on Tom and Violet, played convincingly by Segel and Blunt, the real stars in The Five-Year Engagement are the supporting cast. The ridiculous characters surrounding them create the majority of the humor in the movie. Among the funniest in the group are Chris Pratt who plays Tom’s loveable but moronic best friend, and Alison Brie who dons a British accent as Violet’s dimwitted sister. Honorable mention should go to comedians Brian Posehn and Chris Parnell, a self-proclaimed “pickle nerd” and stay at home dad that become part of Tom’s crew in Michigan. Violet’s co-workers from the university played by Mindy Kaling and Kevin Hart are also a blast.

Despite being slightly long-winded, The Five-Year Engagement is a heartfelt comedy which will keep you laughing all the way through. By the time Tom and Violet finally tie the knot, you’ll be genuinely happy that they found a way to make it work.

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