The Last Five Years

Opens Fri., Feb. 20 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Rated PG-13. 94 minutes.

Every year Cathy (Anna Kendrick) journeys to Ohio for summer stock, plowing through half-baked productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Carousel as she waits for her big break in Manhattan. So we know she sings. That could be justification for the fact that almost everything expressed in The Last Five Years is put to music—maybe this odd film is all happening inside Cathy’s head, a place where everybody breaks out into song to articulate their feelings. The movie does begin with her mournful soliloquy after the break-up, so maybe she’s recalling the highs and lows that take up the remaining hour and a half of movie.

In this case, the feelings revolve around a marriage, which is ending. In the next scene, when we meet her other half Jamie (Jeremy Jordan), it’s at the dawn of their five-year relationship—his songs begin at the beginning, hers go in reverse chronological order. (I didn’t realize this when I watched the movie, but the concept is interesting.) If the set-up has the feel of a stage performance, it should, because the movie is adapted from a two-person theater piece composed by Jason Robert Brown (his new musical version of Honeymoon in Vegas just opened on Broadway). The Last Five Years premiered off-Broadway in 2002 and has had success in local productions ever since. And yeah, you can see how it would work onstage: the starkness of the premise, the direct emotionality of the lyrics and music, the universal themes of romantic partners who are not as well matched as they first think they are.

But in a movie, well… Director Richard LaGravenese, a talented man—his 1998 Living Out Loud remains sadly neglected—has filmed this material with complete sincerity and an intimate focus. And it doesn’t click. Two people crooning on stage is one thing; but when they belt out tunes at full volume right in each other’s faces for 94 minutes, you wonder how they stayed together for even five months. The couple’s crux issue is that Jamie’s career as a novelist skyrockets, while Cathy keeps failing at auditions—a disparity that dooms their youthful ambitions. I like Anna Kendrick, but the role is written at the top of her vocal range, which does her no favors. Jordan, like Kendrick, has lots of musical stage experience, yet looks and sounds totally anonymous. And while the movies have offered us a lot of dubious artists and writers over the years, Jordan’s Jamie may be one of the least likely Voices of a Generation yet committed to film. Robert Horton