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"\n\n It's been over six weeks since I've reviewed a new Jason Segel movie, so maybe time's mists are making me see the past through rose-colored glasses. Even so, I could swear that the young, relatively exciting Segel who starred in the Duplass Brothers dud Jeff, Who Lives at Home back in March had a lot more on the ball than the blubbery dude playing Emily Blunt's lovelorn fianc\u00E9 in The Five-Year Engagement. The bad news is that Five-Year Engagement\u2014produced by Judd Apatow, and co-written by Segel with his Forgetting Sarah Marshall director, Nicholas Stoller\u2014is pretty clearly the one dear to his heart.\n\n He's Tom Solomon, an unconvincingly gifted sous chef in a San Francisco restaurant. His upcoming wedding to aspiring academic, Violet Barnes (Blunt), hits a snag once she gets a plum research gig in far-off Michigan. Loyally, Tom accompanies his future bride to Snowville. Then, he gets frustrated when he ends up making sandwiches in a deli while Violet's career takes off under the tutelage of Rhys Ifans as her suave horndog of a prof. And make no mistake, folks: This is a barely disguised, self-pitying Hollywood fantasy about what one partner's sudden stardom does to the other half's self-esteem. \n\n Ineptly photographed and slackly paced\u2014especially toward the end, every scene just dribbles on and on\u2014the movie is an awkward mix of semi-serious relationship stuff and Apatow-style gags inserted more or less at random. It's anyone's guess as to how many revisions the script went through before achieving neither-fish-nor-fowl status, but you'll come out with a new respect for how Kristen Wiig managed to Apatowize her material without gumming up the tone of Bridesmaids. Even so, it behooves me to record that the preview audience I watched Five-Year Engagement with not only laughed on cue, but seemed touched.\n\n By what, I wonder? We don't get any sense of what drew Tom and Violet to each other in the first place, or what they're like when they're happy, so it's hard to see how any romance for the ages is at risk when they get miserable. Nor are the leads, who have zip chemistry, much fun to watch. Even though Blunt does smile real pretty, she seems to be British as a substitute for giving Violet a personality, and the same goes for Tom's Jewishness. As for Segel, he did romantic forlornness much better in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, mainly because he and we both knew it was meant to be funny. But his is not a face you want to watch suffering in mawkish earnest; he gets excruciatingly fond of his own mushiness.\n\n Anyhow, this is one of those love stories that leaves you grateful anytime the supporting cast can distract you from the leaden central duo. Chris Pratt and Alison Brie have a few good bits as, respectively, Tom's fellow chef and Violet's sister, who end up married themselves early on\u2014though even Pratt can't sell the moment when he humbly vouches for Tom's thwarted culinary genius. (That's not long after Violet learns she isn't really all that good at her own work\u2014you know, the career for which her long-suffering beau sacrificed his own. As I say, there are some fairly unpleasant sublimations in play under the script's surface.) As Tom's mother, Mimi Kennedy has one pretty entertaining rant when she gets sloshed, but that's about it.\n\n Otherwise, oh, let's see: Whoever knitted the comic sweaters Tom ends up wearing in Michigan did a pretty good job. Some of the food looks reasonably edible. And even though it never plays anything but itself, the Golden Gate Bridge still isn't phoning it in. That may not sound like much, but when a movie like this runs an incredible 124 minutes, you take what you can get."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/tom-carson-five-year-engagement-review-jason-segel-emily-blunt>