The Five-Year Engagement

A surprisingly sweet and genuine romantic comedy from producer Judd Apatow and the director/writer/star team of Stoller and Segal, whose previous collaboration, Forgetting Sarah Marshal, like most films from the Apatow gang, didn’t fully work for me despite having a great ending which this film unfortunately does not. What The Five Year Engagement does have is genuine chemistry between its two leads and a script that (pretty much) lives up to its strong premises. This film is about the sacrifices we make for our romantic partners and the pressure these relationships are put under when one partner makes far greater sacrifices for the other. That’s a subject I think is worthy of a film andThe Five Year Engagement explores it in a funny, but refreshingly straight up, way. Only occasionally does the film devolve into the kind of exaggerated farce that Apatow films so often resort to--at least it was only occasional in the theatrical version, these films always have extended cuts that extended their most self-indulgent qualities..

Segal and Blunt are great and while the rest of the cast doesn’t play on the same level, the film sores when it focus on them, which is most of the time. At a time when romantic comedies are either dreadfully saccharine, painfully self-aware or downright ashamed of themselves, I’ll take a film that is almost always funny, pure of heart and satisfying.