We start where most movies end: A happy city-slicker couple pledge to spend the rest of their lives together, as a famous American landmark twinkles behind them.
From then on, Nicholas Stoller’s weird, endearingly messy The Five-Year Engagement embarks on an uncharted circular voyage. Its two wistful, determined leads — Emily Blunt as grad student Violet and Jason Segel as sous-chef Tom — are caught in a Sisyphean premarital loop.
That doesn’t make the film sound very funny, and honestly it isn’t — at least not in the same fall-on-your-face-laughing league as Forgetting Sarah Marshall or the rest of the Apatow Factory crop. But The Five-Year Engagement, with a script co-written by Segel and Stoller, feels poignant and real in a way few raunch comedies are.
What drives the sadness is a universal familiar: the act of sacrificing for someone you love, and the long-term consequences of making those concessions. Violet gets accepted to a graduate psychology program at the University of Michigan, so Tom turns down an offer to run his own San Francisco restaurant, loading up the van and moving to Ann Arbor to become a deli boy and housesitter. And the wedding goes on hold — where it will stay.
A magnificent college town, Ann Arbor carries with it the stigma of lengthy, miserable winters. For Violet, the appeal of academia’s lecture halls and grad-student bars gives their new home an Edenic glow. For Tom, it’s a snowy exile from real life, and one that offers no real shot at happiness. (Seems a bit unfair to the multitude of real-life chefs working comfortably on the town’s Main Street.)