Movie story:

One year after Tom meets Violet he proposes to her ,they get engaged on new year’s Eve but they keep getting tripped up on the long walk down the aisle, Tom and Violet will learn if they have what it takes to survive their five- year engagement .

Movie review:

Tom (Jason Segel) and Violet (Emily Blunt) are a young San Francisco couple who are just getting engaged as the movie begins: He’s an ambitious sous-chef at a trendy restaurant, she’s an aspiring psych professor. Soon after the engagement, Violet’s dream of getting a teaching position at Berkeley falls through; instead, she’s offered a post-doc fellowship at the University of Michigan.

In Michigan, Violet experiences a professional thriving: She’s thrilled with her adviser (Rhys Ifans) and her fellow postdocs, even though, as played by Mindy Kaling, Randall Park, and Kevin Hart, they seem more like lovable crackpots than stimulating colleagues. But in a slacker spin on A Star Is Born, Violet’s career is rising even as Tom’s falls. Underemployed and depressed, he grows hideous frontier-man sideburns and takes to hunting game with a similarly emasculated faculty spouse (Chris Parnell).

Most of the film’s best moments come in this middle section, as we watch the couple deal with the strain and anxiety of deciding whose needs should be put first, and for how long. Unlike many obstacles in romantic-comedy plots, this is one a lot of real people have experienced, and at its sharpest, the script can be quite perceptive about the passive-aggressive politics of conjugal compromise.

The Five-Year Engagement also allows its female characters to be recognizable human beings with senses of humor and personality traits other than niceness. Both Violet and her sister Suzie (Alison Brie) are funny, flawed, believable characters.

Without giving away too much, I can say that Tom and Violet’s relationship grows progressively rockier—culminating in the traditional third-act separation montage scored to a poignant pop song—and that, by the end, the couple’s mutual ambivalence and latent hostility are thrown to the winds as the sacredness of the marriage bond—or at least of the cloyingly cute wedding sequence—is reaffirmed.

I would have loved it if The Five-Year Engagement had had the courage to let its lead couple reunite in a tentative, provisional way, starting to trust each other again but not yet daring to pick out a font for the save-the-date cards. Instead, the denouement is so over compensatory in its giddiness that we can’t quite believe that Violet and Tom have a shot at resolving the legitimate conflicts that tore them apart.

We’re left with the sinking sense that, if this movie had a sequel, it might have to be called The Six-Year Marriage.

We also Suggest: Brides maids , Forgetting Sarah Marshall , The Heartbreak Kid & Meet the Parents.

icholas Stoller

Reviewed by: Riham Adel