The Five-Year Engagement – review

So many feelgood romantic comedies turn out to be feelbad, feelbored or feelinsulted, written by people with an actuarial sense of which buttons to push to maximise commercial success. Finding one that's halfway decent is the film-going equivalent of seeing Halley's comet, so it's a pleasure to watch The Five Year Engagement, starring Jason Segel, and co-written by him and Nicholas Stoller, screenwriters of the recent Muppets movie; Stoller directs, and it is co-produced by Judd Apatow. The Five Year Engagement isn't perfect, but it's a commercial date movie with warmth, sweetness, charm and laughs, and some witty wedding scenes surely inspired by our own Richard Curtis. It brings a light touch to modern romance, and the fact that commitment phobia, so long a male prerogative, is now being claimed by women.

The movie deploys an odd-couple pairing: beefy, goofy, well-meaning Segel with elegant, wand-thin Emily Blunt. As in Seth Rogen's Knocked Up, there's some authorial wish-fulfilment in the heavy-set funny guy getting the beautiful girl. But it's artlessly persuasive, and the film certainly succeeds in swathing the audience with the romcomfort blanket, yet at the same time giving us gags, and also a sense that the story should happen in a place vaguely resembling the real world, populated by people with something like real problems. Kind of.

Segel is Tom, an up-and-coming chef in San Francisco; for a year he has been dating Violet, played by Emily Blunt, a British research student in experimental psychology, who is angling for a postdoctoral position at UCLA. When Tom proposes, the movie treats the couple to an uproariously Curtisian "engagement party", an invention with which Stoller and Segel can cleverly frontload their film with quasi-wedding-scene gags about embarrassing in-laws, while leaving the marriage question unresolved. The happy couple are highly disconcerted by a scenario their own nuptials have brought into being: at the party, Tom's laddish best man Alex (Chris Pratt) puts the moves on Violet's equally posh sister Suzie, played with what seemed to me a very good English accent by Alison Brie (Pete Campbell's wife Trudy in TV's Mad Men).

This situation plants the first tiny seed of self-doubt and self-consciousness in their minds. When Violet is offered a two-year appointment in far-off Michigan, Tom gallantly agrees to put his own career on hold and delay their own wedding plans while they're out there. But there's no call for fancy chefs in this snowy, parochial place, and Violet's career blossoms under the unsettling care of her charismatic professor, played by Rhys Ifans.

A couple of years ago, Nanette Burstein's comedy Going the Distance – about a long-distance relationship – made an reasonable stab at representing the actual experience of romance in a modern world in which women have careers as well as the men. The Five Year Engagement does its best to accommodate this reality as well. Tom bullishly declares that he can "cook anywhere", but of course part of him realises that abandoning his job in the big city could be a fatal blow to his career momentum. And Segel and Stoller entertainingly show that, once in the back of beyond, Tom's embrace of local house-husband pursuits like hunting, knitwear and beard-growing is a form of mental breakdown. The movie, perhaps by accident, makes the feminist point that this is precisely the kind of frustration and depression that women have been expected to endure for centuries.

As for Violet, Emily Blunt brings to the role genuine sympathy, and she continues to thaw out the ice-queen hauteur of her earlier movies: The Devil Wears Prada, and perhaps more scarily still, Paweł Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love. Violet is of course a nice person who is seduced, not romantically as much as conceptually, attempting to build her career around a specious theory of self-worth and self-esteem that she is developing from leaving test subjects in an observation room with a box of day-old doughnuts, and seeing which of them will hold out for the promised fresh batch. This is her romcom equivalent of the "Stanford Experiment", a dangerous concept which will harm her own happiness.

And so their engagement drags on to the unthinkable five-year mark, and with it Tom and Violet's growing suspicion that their lives together, and their lives in general, are a failure. They're not sure whether they've made a terrible mistake. And all the time their youth is running out.

Blunt and Segel work together very nicely, but the downside is that when they are apart, the film loses a bit of fizz: their separate lives are quite as contrived and absurd, but quite not so funny and interesting. But the course of romcom, like that of true love, can't be expected to run smooth – and we can't afford to be snobby about very good mainstream entertainment.