The Five Year Engagement
For a long time I would watch romantic comedies and wonder about the time after that perfect first kiss. You know, after the movie ends. I mean what does the nerd who never had a girlfriend really know about being with the drop dead gorgeous woman? What happens to the woman chasing guy with a heart of gold know about monogamy? I guess the question boils down to what happens to the rest of us? I’ve been in many relationships where the first kiss and acknowledgement of our feelings for each other seems to be the beginning of a next level romance. The kind of romance that people read about and sigh because they are so wanting of that kind of love. Yet no one sticks around for the moment when she eventually grows tired of the man and leaves him a quivering angry pile of goo. Yes goo. That’s where a lot of romantic comedies lose me. What happens after everyone is happy and getting married. It can’t always work out, can it? Am I doing it wrong? Probably but the truth is that no one really wants to see if it works out, they want to see it maybe work out and assume that it does.
Jason Segel’s Tom proposes to his girlfriend of one year in the first scene of The Five Year Engagement and that wide eyed, happily in love schmuck can’t see what the next five years hold for him. He is happy, successful and moving towards being married to Emily Blunt’s Violet. Yeah, I’d be pretty wide eyed and hopeful if I had that too. Immediately things start to go wrong. Her sister (Alison Brie with a constantly fading British accent) has a perfect shotgun wedding, Violet gets rejected by Berkeley and accepted to the psych program at the University of Michigan instead. So Tom plays the good husband and agrees to leave his career behind and move with her to Michigan. In two years, they can get married. The five year engagement does tell you all you need to know about the movie in the title. This engagement is gonna be long and with that length, certain things about the relationship will be tested.
It is interesting to see Jason Segel begin to go crazy in Michigan when he can’t find a job, his friend back home takes the job he was supposed to have and is successful and all he has to do with his time is work a crappy job and hunt. It wears on a man to feel worthless and less than his partner. Being unemployed and in a relationship did that to me. There really is nothing worse than having nothing to say to the person you love. Segel captures that desperation and need to keep the relationship going in The Five Year Engagement and I felt as though I resented Violet too. She gets everything she wants and never really considers what it is doing to the man she loves. She hides from him and goes out drinking with her friends, including her psychology professor who makes a pass at her. Only after that does she consider what Segel is going through. Her character is quite oblivious in this regard. Yet Tom can hardly be blameless here. Why can’t he start his own restaurant in Michigan? Are the Michiganites so uncouth that a San Francisco chef can’t make something they’d like other than a awesome sandwich? Tom is playing it safe and letting Violet run his life. So he kind of deserves the fate he got. These two are deeply flawed individuals but as a couple they can be really good and really bad. Like real people.
That is probably what makes the movie work for me. There is no good reason for Tom to let Violet run his life and there is no reason why Tom can't make the best of living in Michigan. They are real people though and the writers don't let Tom and Violet have all the magic answers to solve their problems. They have to come organically. Yet they really do love each other. That is the key to anything. I try not to believe in it sometimes but love really does matter. If you can fall in love with someone, there is nothing you can’t get through. It may take breaking up for a year, or it may take just simply hating the other person for a while until you realize that loving them is what you were meant to do. They aren’t perfect. No relationship is. Here is the problem with most people these days is that when there is a problem in a relationship, people just give up. Oh well, it obviously wasn’t gonna work because something didn’t fit perfectly. Relationship is about compromise and sometimes it is about arguments. You can’t have a perfect couple and if you say you do have that, I’m gonna call my superhero friend Bullshit Man to fly in and call you on it. Relationships are about how you deal with bad times and in this, The Five Year Engagement succeeds. There is nothing easy about Tom and Violet’s relationship. Indeed there are body parts lost, leg wounds inflicted, infidelities and a lot of arguments. Yet they want nothing more than to be with each other and that is how the movie confirms that they are meant for each other. It isn’t some magical kismet. It is their ability to look at the other person, with all their flaws and say “Fuck it. I love you.”
Mr. Unhappy Sez : Love is a many splendid thing, well really it is half splendid and half blinding pain. Just like life, the movie isn’t perfect and because of that, it kind of is.
Now a moment of clarity from Furious Kinky....
A FURIOUS KINKY NOTE:
The Avengers comes out this week. For those of you in the 50- 90 age range and those who just don’t get the superhero thing, you aren’t gonna like the movie anyway. I haven’t even seen it yet and I will still tell you that you should probably give it a chance. It isn’t gonna be perfect. It is probably gonna give you the raised eyebrow of credibility…but it shouldn’t be credible. This is a story about our myths, not a truthful tale of what happens when aliens attack and we have a bunch of superheroes save us. Get your head out of your ass. Watch the movie, get out of your own head for a minute and enjoy the pretty shiny explosions and the humorous moments of triumph for the human race. It isn’t art but it is damn entertaining. Suck it, haters…
Furious Kinky Sez: See it before the Hulk gets angry....you wouldn't like him when he's angry.
