The Last Five Years
As a director, Richard LaGravenese doesn’t bring much that’s exciting to the musical adaptation, “The Last Five Years.” The visual scheme is simple– when things are positive, light is prominent, and when things are difficult, darkness takes over the images –and there aren’t a lot of elaborate numbers to choreograph, but this isn’t that type of musical. The film rises and falls with how the emotions behind Jason Robert Brown’s songs are performed, and as a screenwriter, LaGravenese lets his actors, Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, do their thing, and the result as emotionally rich as it is musically engaging.
Brown’s musical play looks at the relationship between Cathy (Kendrick), a struggling actor, and Jaime (Jordan), a successful author, from the vantage point of both individuals, with a twist: while Cathy is making her way back from the moment Jaime leaves to when they first met and fell in love, Jaime begins at the start, and makes his way up to the moment he leaves Cathy. It’s a lot like the structure of “(500) Days of Summer,” but with even more singing and dancing than just that film’s one, great set piece, and a perspective that allows us to see both Cathy and Jaime’s emotional journeys. That we start out at the lowest point for Cathy, when she comes home to find Jaime gone, having closed their bank account, and left his ring and a note, makes us immediately sympathize with Cathy, but as the film goes on, we feel for Jaime, even though ultimately, his actions make him in the wrong. But we see that Jaime has some emotional stress, as well, especially when it comes to keeping positive about Cathy’s struggles as an actor. By the end, we feel like they will be better off in the long run, but seeing where they started, and where they’re ending up at the end of this film’s 94 minutes it’s going to take time for both.
The thing that really stuck out about “The Last Five Years” is how much the emotional storytelling is the center of the film. Each scene is a different emotional moment for the characters, and each one charts a different path that will end the same way. Brown’s structure for the play is a gimmick, but it works to see the back-and-forth, and also, to see the ways both Cathy and Jaime see the stops along the way. When we see Jaime’s perspective of their first time together, it’s about the taboo of being with a non-Jewish girl for the first time, but when we finally see Cathy’s memories of that, it’s about the romance of finding someone she loves. Similarly, when they reach the end of the road of their relationship, Cathy sees Jaime as distant and more engaged in his career than their life together, someone who can’t even make the effort to stay a weekend with her in Ohio at a musical theater workshop. Jaime, meanwhile, sees Cathy as someone who is suffocating him emotionally, relying on him too much as a emotional pillar for her failing acting career. The ultimate aim in “The Last Five Years” is to show how difficult relationships are for people who may have equally big ambitions in their careers, but only one manages to accomplish them. What Cathy and Jaime don’t do is double down on their love, and work with the other to make that work. Or, maybe the glow of their early days together was a mirage, and there was no way they could make it work? LaGravenese is a smart filmmaker for this material; yes, he’s got stuff like “The Ref” and “Unbroken” and “Beautiful Creatures” to his writing credits, but his strongest work as a writer and/or director (“Living Out Loud,” “P.S. I Love You,” “The Horse Whisperer” and “The Fisher King”) is about people who have to find themselves through adversity and tough times in their lives, and that fits the bill of “The Last Five Years” perfectly. It helps that he’s got great leads in Kendrick (who, let’s be honest, is arguably her generation’s Julie Andrews in terms of musicals, at this point) and Jordan, both of whom capture the emotions of the songs beautifully, and sing them effortlessly, as well. Musical love stories always seem to be painful affairs, and that’s very much the case with “The Last Five Years,” and the three people at the center of the film (LaGravenese, Kendrick, and Jordan) make us experience every heart-rending moment. It’s a keeper.
