The Five-Year Engagement and why soliders love romantic comedies

Directed by Nicholas Stoller

Starring Jason Segel, Emily Blunt, Chris Pratt, Alison Brie, Rhys Ifans, Chris Parnell, Kevin Hart, Mindy Kaling, Randall Park, Mimi Kennedy, and David Paymer

This week my body went on strike. By Sunday evening it was all, like:

Body: You don’t treat me fairly so that’s that. Until further notice I don’t work for you no more.

Ben: But… wait… no, no, imma need you to do stuff this week.

Body: Well shucks, I guess you shoulda thought of that before you decided black sambuca on a Sunday night was a good idea.

So instead of a Boozy Wednesday, Martyn and I took in a romantic comedy on our straightmatedate night, my fare of choice on days when I’m feeling haggard. The Five-Year Engagement  is taking a lot of flack from reviewers and I’d like to use this forum as a sort of counterweight. Not only are they all wrong in their assessments of what I perceive as a very fine picture, but people’s ideas in general about romantic comedy seem awfully misguided.

It may surprise readers to discover that romantic comedy is among my favourite film genres. Unexpected, sure, since this column is essentially a tribute to huge dudes who beat each other senseless and women taking their gear off, both of which are generally absent from rom-coms.

A second major surprise (and one which perhaps goes some ways towards explaining my penchant for them): soldiers love these movies. They’ll never confess to it, but they eat rom-com goop up like the viscous centre of a chocolate fondant. It’s a discovery I made while on the mother-of-all-tedious-taskings, which essentially consisted of a company of men having their asses parked in their rooms or in a pickup truck for months on end. This is not a good place for hundreds of guys on high protein diets to be.

The rec centre, which lent out DVDs, was a frequent destination for most. When signing out a DVD I would always catch a glimpse of what dudes in my platoon were checking out and found myself perplexed by what I discovered. Sure, there were the obligatory “Rah! Rah! Guns! Fuck yeah!” guys who would borrow out The Condemned or 12 Rounds or some other ungodliness. But a majority were opting for unlikely flicks such as 17 Again or Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. And the guys who were watching them were not 18-year-old recruits who lived with mommy and still drank warm milk with their meals. These were hardened, Afghanistan-tested Warrant Officers who’d been pronounced dead in IED attacks before climbing out of the truck, dusting themselves off, and telling the medic: “Just playing possum to see how you’d react. WOs don’t die. We just sleep it off for a few minutes.”

So I would return to my tiny, shared quarters, left to ponder the mystery of why these consummate hardasses were going so ga-ga over Matthew McConaughey wearing scarves. After some deliberation, I came to these conclusions about the rom-com genre:

• It is imbued with a certain innocence. In a way that almost never feels condescending towards the viewer, these films manage to give both the good and bad characters their due and deliver a conclusion that is satisfying and just.
• They are movies that concern themselves primarily with making the viewer HAPPY.
• They are unpretentious (this can often lead to the lower end of the quality spectrum catering to the lowest common denominator but whatever, I’d still rather watch that than I’m Not There or whatever other movie decided it needed to be all the way up in its own ass to, like, find the appendix or something).
• Rom-coms care about their characters and therefore care about people. Conversely, the crew that created Oldboy are cinematic visionaries, no doubt, but dude I remember watching that movie and not feeling human by the end.

A bad week in the army calls for next-level escapism, and soldiers aren't always allowed to drink. Rom-com is just the next best thing.

And so I feel the standards by which rom-coms are judged to be generally unfair. They are not taken seriously because they aspire to enliven audiences and make them laugh rather than get too concerned by fancy production design and cinematography. Critics, audiences, and the Academy reward movies like Shakespeare in Love or Titanic that are 100% artifice yet take themselves so seriously that their workaday, melodramatic sentimentality becomes all the more nauseating. Clearly, because Jim Cameron spent 200 mil on this movie it’s a great work of art (it must be, right?) and Jack & Rose are part of an immutable film canon of star-crossed lovers. But make a film like Dedication on a shoestring budget with an independent director unafraid of black humour and it’s derided mercilessly as annoying or saccharine.

Blunt and Segel: charming to the last

One is a nihilistic wank-fest whose characters are ciphers (not to mention all morons) and the other is brimming with inspired performances by some of the industry’s finest and actually motivates you to be a better person and embrace life. But fuck do I hate critics sometimes.

They try to bust out the same Hatorade on The Five-Year Engagement, a modest, pleasant story about a couple (played Emily Blunt and Jason Segel) whose delayed nuptials exacerbate their differences, strain their relationship, and bring forth bitterness and insecurity. It’s a clever film with strong leads, plenty of laughs, and that also takes a lot of risks – uncommon for something of this ilk. Still, most critics are determined to deep-six this slow-burner of a film for reasons that are invalid or just plain wrong. Let’s take a look at some of the popular defamation:

“It’s overdrawn.”

That’s. The whole. POINT. It’s not The Six-Month Engagement. It’s FIVE YEARS. The movie wouldn’t be doing its job if it tied up all its loose ends in 86 minutes. I respect a mainstream studio film that chances a 2+ hour running time and challenges its audience to stick with it. “We’re gonna make it feel like five years,” is what the film says and does, and kudos to director Nichols Stoller for that. It’s a bold move and it works because you invest in the characters, and their journey is real and compelling.

“The gags and set-pieces are contrived.”

And people lined up to watch The Artist because…

“The ending is bland and unsatisfying.”

This is the critique befalling rom-coms that I hate the most. We don’t watch these movies expecting them to throw us a curveball at the end. We watch them categorically because we trust them not to. This is the point I was trying to make before about soldiers loving syrupy romantic comedies. When you’re in an environment characterised by extreme boredom, aggressive, authoritarian leadership, or huge quantities of death you want a movie that keeps it positive and sustains your faith in humanity. HOW IS THIS A BAD THING?

“The supporting cast is one-dimensional.”

Booze: the way to any woman's heart.

This is just patently false. One of the great joys of FYE  is watching Chris Pratt, Segel’s laddish, comically irresponsible sous-chef best friend, transform into a respectable gent. It’s a change that occurs naturally, adds dimension to the film, and counterpoints the leading man. Similarly engaging is Rhys Ifans’ pompous, slithering psychology professor and Emily Blunt’s mentor – a villain the audience loves to hate but can also understand Blunt’s illicit attraction to. Most, if not all, the supporting cast evolves throughout the film – not merely the leads.

This is a good movie any way you cut it. Stoller’s direction is competent and well-paced, bringing his and Segel’s script and characters to life. Everyone onscreen is a pleasure to watch; each actor given their chance to shine in a movie that delivers memorable comic moments without feeling obliged to crank jokes out gratuitously. Plus Jason Segel is basically the most obscenely LIKABLE screen presence in American cinema since Jimmy Stewart. There. I said it.

This movie cures common cold, hangovers, and probably cancer too. Just go see it and enjoy your lives, you grumpy, misanthropic bastards.