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The ups and downs of a relationship over a five-year period, from first courtship to eventual divorce, told using a whole load of songs.
Starring Anna Kendrick, Jeremy Jordan
Written by Richard LaGravenese
Produced by Janet Brenner, Kurt Deutsch, Richard LaGravenese
Duration 94 minutes
Oh God, a musical. Great. OK, deep breath, engage maximum level of tolerance …
Musicals are my number one least favourite movie genre. Well, type of live performance as well – and as a leisurely stroll down London’s Shaftsbury Avenue will reveal, they have a majority stake in theatreland.
So at least they don’t dominate moving pictures in the same way they do, er, moving people. But it wasn’t always this way. The ’30s to ’50s are considered ‘the golden age of musical films’, when you couldn’t move for the things. It seems that as soon as Hollywood could do both visuals and pre-recorded sound (THE JAZZ SINGER, with its famous "You ain’t heard nothin’ yet" snippet, came out in 1927), they couldn’t wait to choke the public with as many song and dance numbers as those poor people could stomach.
In my younger years, musicals were easy to avoid. Sometimes when watching a Disney cartoon, I’d realise that I was actually sitting in front of a musical, but those scenes usually passed by relatively painlessly. (And, since this was the home video era, were easily fast-forwardable – the anthropomorphic ROBIN HOOD, a personal favourite, has a dreary love ballad between Robin and Marion that always had me reaching for the chunky VHS remote.)
Then came the turn
of the 21st Century and a worrying musical revival. Both originals, like SOUTH
PARK: BIGGER, LONGER, UNCUT (1999), and new adaptations, like CHICAGO (2002),
MAMMA MIA (2008) and LES MISERABLES (2012). Things did calm down after that initial
flourish, but nowadays you still see (or, in my case, don't see) the likes of
IN THE HEIGHTS (2021) and Spielberg’s stab at WEST SIDE STORY (also 2021).
Exactly why do I hate musicals? I guess I just don’t understand the need to express a story through singing and dancing. I don’t enjoy watching them and I don’t enjoy listening to them. Specifically, their artificiality leaves me cold – how completely removed they are from reality, like the way all the people move in unnatural synchronicity, as if some kind of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS hive mind, with creepy fixed grins plastered on their faces (an anxiety that recent horror hit SMILE utilised effectively). The stories are usually thin, the characters shallow and the themes overplayed, and the performance element is used to distract the viewer from those shortcomings.
Look, there are some musicals that I like. The two that come to mind are THE BLUES BROTHERS and O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? But crucially, those are actually straight comedies with performance numbers in them. Conventional narratives interrupted by people stopping what they are doing to sing and dance as part of the story; not stories taking place in some alternate reality where that’s how regular people interact day to day.
Despite all this, I did actually fire THE LAST FIVE YEARS up with some level of optimism, having read up on it beforehand.
One nugget of hope was that it plays with traditional structure, something I tend to appreciate. The five-year relationship is told alternatively from beginning to end by the male protagonist (Jeremy Jordan) and from end back to beginning by the female (Anna Kendrick). Another was that this bittersweet, contrast-heavy format inevitably delivers a healthy dose of cynicism, not (or not only) your usual cheery, jolly, cringey let’s-all-leap-about-and-belt-our-hearts-out business.
And so, because I knew it was unlikely that I would genuinely ‘enjoy’ THE LAST FIVE YEARS, I did my best to take an objective, removed and rational standpoint – just like real critics do ... I imagine.
The lyrics are very on the nose, as expected. But I guess that’s because what the characters are really doing is singing out their inner monologues. When Anna Kendrick laments finding a letter from hubby asking for a divorce, she’s not going to modulate her manner of speaking – she’s just going to react. Are the words she sings out straight from her head (or, you could of course also say, heart) sincere? Yes, they do seem to be.
The set pieces often break through the walls of reality, with incidents, people and places mentioned in the songs entering into the ‘real’ world of where the singing is happening. For example, Jordan’s first number takes place in his apartment bedroom as the couple get it on for the first time, and when he opens his closet he reveals girls from previous unsuccessful relationships as he describes them. But that’s OK, it’s illustrative, they aren’t really ‘there’, they aren’t rearranging the clothes on the hangers or anything.
And are any of the characters in the creative industries, like in every romcom ever? Yes, bloody both of them: the guy is an author, the girl is a dancer. Well, that’s a trope, and you can’t hate something for using tropes, every type of film has tropes. And the romcom comparison is apt, since that’s certainly a genre with which musicals often overlap. It may be unsurprising to learn that I don’t like those much either, but I’ve learned to tolerate romcoms far more than I have musicals. So, maybe there is hope.
It seems to me now, after an hour and a half of THE LAST FIVE YEARS, that there is something about musicals that is instinctive, primal. Not unfinished and shallow, as I’d always believed, rather extracted directly from within and then thrown onto the screen unfiltered. They can show truth – in a stark way that may feel awkward in its rawness, but the pursuit of truth is certainly a purpose of art and so should be applauded.
Perhaps I now understand the genre better. It doesn’t mean I have to like musicals and start going through the MGM back catalogue. But it does mean I can better try to appreciate them, and don’t have to just lazily brandish a one-star verdict and move on. (I'll graduate to two stars, instead.)
So come on, then. Any other musical films with ‘last’ in the title out there? Bring it on – I’m ready for ya!
Two stars out of five.
Valid use of the
word ‘last’? They ain’t getting back together, that’s
for sure. So the word works in both its ‘previous’ and ‘final’ senses.
What would a movie called THE FIRST
FIVE YEARS be about? Due to the backwards/forwards structure, it
would be exactly the same movie.
Previously: STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI
Next time: THE LAST STAND
Check out my books: Jonathanlastauthor.com
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