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‘THE LAST FIVE YEARS’ IS ENTERTAINING, BUT DARKENED BY FATALISM

2/16/15

The new film “The Last Five Years,” a musical that tells the story of a romantic relationship, begins just as that relationship is ending. We see Cathy, the wife (Anna Kendrick), sitting alone in a darkened apartment and reading her husband’s farewell letter, as she sings, “Jamie is over and Jamie is gone/Jamie’s decided it’s time to move on/Jamie has new dreams he’s building upon/And I’m still hurting. . . .”

Which creates a jolt when suddenly it’s a bright, sunny day, and a younger Cathy is fervently making out with Jamie (Jeremy Jordan) on the stoop.

“The Last Five Years,” based on Jason Robert Brown’s Off-Broadway musical of the same name, has an unconventional structure that keeps taking us abruptly back and forth in time. In Cathy’s part of the story, we travel from the end of the relationship back to the beginning; when Jamie is the focus, we’re moving forward from the beginning to the end.

As one would expect, it’s not always easy to follow the narrative, though the filmmakers try to help us out with different lighting and different hairstyles for the lead actors in the different parts of the story, and a shot of the New York City skyline every time a transition is coming up. Still, this way of telling it offers the viewer an interesting and unusual perspective on this relationship, in which both characters tend to suffer from a lack of perspective.

For instance, when we’ve already seen the failure of the relationship through Cathy’s eyes, the subsequent showing of how it began seems littered with red flags. In a number set during their first sexual encounter at her apartment, Jamie sings exuberantly about how she’s the first girlfriend he’s had who isn’t Jewish like him:

“If you had a tattoo, that wouldn’t matter
If you had a shaved head, that would be cool
If you came from Spain or Japan
Or the back of a van
Just as long as you’re not from Hebrew school
I’d say, ‘Now I’m getting somewhere!
‘I’m finally breaking through!'”

Jamie’s eagerness to break free from his heritage reflects his restless, driven spirit. That drive helps him get his first book published at 23, achieve major success with it, and start a relationship with Cathy, all at once (for this stage of his life, he gets a song called “Moving Too Fast”). But that same restless spirit makes him start to feel uncomfortable as soon as he’s married to her. Though he loves his wife, he finds monogamy unexpectedly stifling — especially as his book’s success leads to plenty of meetings and parties where he’s surrounded by attractive women:

“And in a perfect world
A miracle would happen
And every other girl would fly away
And it’d be me and Cathy,
And nothing else would matter
But it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine
I mean, I’m happy
And I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine
It’s not a problem
It’s just a challenge
It’s a challenge to resist
Temptation . . .”

Cathy, for her part, finds herself resenting Jamie’s successful career as her own career stagnates. Her frustration at her repeated failures as an actress leads to the film’s funniest scene, as she skypes Jamie from Ohio — the only place she’s able to find acting work — to complain about various aspects of life there, including “sharing a room with a former stripper and her snake, Wayne.” But that resentment and frustration, unchecked, ultimately have serious consequences: After a certain point, she can no longer bring herself to support and encourage her husband in his work. Although back in the first scene she sang of being “covered with scars I did nothing to earn,” as we trace her journey back to the beginning, we see that she too bears some responsibility for the marriage’s failure.

“The Last Five Years” has enjoyable songs and vibrant performances from two very talented leads, but because we know from the first what’s going to happen, the whole endeavor has a fatalistic feel. It’s as if this relationship was doomed from the start, and that makes it increasingly painful to watch Cathy, as her story moves backward in time, appearing increasingly starry-eyed and hopeful. The film wraps up with a number showcasing the two of them at opposite ends of the story: Jamie writes his letter of farewell to Cathy, as she, five years in the past, is seen celebrating their newfound love.

As Brown based this musical on his own short-lived first marriage, there was hardly any other way it could end. And he deserves credit for making his own fictional alter ego a very flawed character, and not putting all or even most of the blame on the character’s wife. But the problem with the story’s fatalism is that it ultimately seems to leave both spouses without choices, or real responsibility, or hope. As he’s writing his letter at the end, Jamie sings, “It’s not about another shrink/It’s not about another compromise,” but the nature of the film is such that we haven’t actually seen any shrinks, or any compromises, for that matter. We saw two characters who came together, were intensely happy for a short time, and then broke apart again.

“The Last Five Years” — which opened in limited release but is widely available via On Demand and iTunes — is a bold and entertaining little experiment in filmmaking. It takes advantage of the resurgence of the musical film (Kendrick may be the first performer in decades to build her career largely on movie musicals), but scales it way down from epics like “Les Miserables” and “Into the Woods” to something much more intimate and personal. But the cloud that hangs over the relationship — the fact that neither spouse has the commitment to truly fight for the marriage, or the ability to put the other person first — can’t help but cast a shadow over it all.

Image copyright RADiUS-TWC. “The Last Five Years” is rated PG-13 for sexual material, brief strong language, and a drug image.

Gina Dalfonzo is editor of BreakPoint.org and Dickensblog.

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