Nathaniel's adventures in Toronto. Day 3
The first thing you see in The Last Five Years is a white brownstone. It looks almost like a ghost in the middle of a New York City block. As the notes begin to play, the camera drifts upwards to peer into windows and search for its movie star within them. No, that's not her. Not her either. Ah, there she is. Anna Kendrick sings the entirety of "Still Hurting", moping around a dark apartment, crying. The camera moves around her (in strange patterns) and her voice is just beautiful. And then I realize I've forgotten to breathe and am gripping my armrest.
I have a strange relationship to modern movie musicals. We're about 14 years into the movie musical's modern resurgence after two decades of a major drought but it's still hit and miss as to quality and success (not necessarily related). I always desperately want them to be great since there are so few. The fact is, though it's grossly unfair, each of them bears far more responsibility in keeping an entire genre alive than any action, horror, drama, epic or comedy out there. I have trouble relaxing watching them because of all this pressure and only when the film is gobsmackingly great or confident (like a Moulin Rouge!) do the "ohmygodpleasedontkillthemusical" nerves subside and just let me thrill to what's in front of me.
Anna Kendrick with composer Jason Robert Brown (he has a cameo in the movie)
Fans of the original stage production "The Last Five Years," are many and quite obsessed within the musical theater freak communities. I myself was an early devotee - I'd rank it easily in the top ten musicals written in the past 40 years or so and I've listened to it regularly ever since. Super fans should breathe a huge sigh of relief that the score is intact and composer Jason Robert Brown and Sherie Rene Scott (the original Cathy) are still involved. Another tension-breaker: Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan are both very good as the young lovers Cathy and Jamie.
I can't tell you how pleasureable it is to hear an entire musical sung by people who have no trouble singing it and singing it expressively because they are both actors and singers, and not actors who are trying to sing for a film role. The highest compliment I can pay them is after years of listening to the original productions recording - I know every word and inflection - I'd totally buy this and probably alternate it with Sherie & Norbert's solo when the mood struck. (As a point of comparison, I almost never listen to Chicago, Hairspray or Les Miz film soundtracks and NEVER the Sweeney Todd after one listen because if I'm in the mood, on go the stage production recordings without a moment's hesitation.)
That's the good news. But elsewhere we're hit and miss.
The film is extremely faithful to the stage play even keeping the conceptual tracking of Jamie's solos moving the story forward in time while Cathy's move the timeline backwards. Which is to say that Cathy starts out jaded, sad and angry and gets happier hopeful and excited by the end; Jamie does the opposite, compounding the tragic beauty of their troubled connection and echoing their unfortunate career trajectories. The problem with the film version of this concept is that director Richard LaGravenese hasn't really worked out a way to clarify this for audiences and I can't imagine anyone watching it for the first time, understanding that each time Cathy sings we are moving only backwards in time and each time Jamie sings only forward. Further confounding the confusion is that their solos don't truly feel like solos (though they are) because the characters are acting so much within the other's song so their character arcs are all scrambled. To confirm my suspicions I asked a critic friend who hadn't seen the play and he thought they were just hopping around in time like a 21 Grams situation. Another random moviegoer also confirmed this suspicion. (Naturally, the story doesn't have the same thematic oomph if you don't understand that this is happening.) There are a few minor attempts to show this visually, the most successful being two beautifully touching shots near the film's end when you see both characters onscreen simuitaneously but are aware unmistakably that they aren't actually sharing the same time. But even this moment is marred with a weird decision of a costume change.
"Summer in Ohio" is the comic highlight. Anna aces it!
So it's hit and miss throughout. Some numbers are well staged like the very funny "Summer in Ohio" and some exceptionally moving like "The Next Ten Minutes" but others seem confused about how far to push the musical reality. But I was pleasantly surprised by "The Schmuel Song" which I could not imagine working in the film, but it does.
But the biggest problem, that drags this highly faithful and beautifully sung adaptation of a truly unique musical down from "masterwork" to "good" is the direction and that camerawork which never stops searching for the subject from that opening scene til the close when we've circled back to that white brownstone. The subject (this relationship) is right in front of you; just shoot it, get out of its way! For no reason you can possibly surmise beyond lack of nerve ('will people be bored?') the camera rarely stops moving and it's very distracting. There is weird spinning around the characters and occasional nostril tight Les Miz closeups (not that close, please!). Worst of all is the unthinkable use of a jittery handheld camera which comes out frequently. Whenever the camera calms down, which does happens from time to time, the songs and performances just grab you. Why not just place your camera in a few advantageous places and let Anna and Jeremy show us how right they are for Cathy and Jamie. And that is, happily, very right indeed. Even if Cathy and Jamie were never right enough. B
The Last Five Years is planning a 2015 Valentines Day release. Because marriages falling apart is super romantic!
Also at TIFF: A Little Chaos, Wild, The Gate, Cub, The Farewell Party, Behavior, The Theory of Everything, Imitation Game, Foxcatcher, Song of the Sea, 1001 Grams, Labyrinth of Lies, Sand Dollars, Wild Tales, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, Force Majeure, Life in a Fishbowl, Out of Nature, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, Charlie's Country, and Mommy