The Last Five Years (Richard LaGravenese, 2014): USA

Reviewed by Mimmi Karlsson. Viewed at the Lobero Theater at Santa Barbara Film Festival 2015.

If you really love musicals, this could be one of your favorites. The Last Five Years is a movie based on the musical with the same name by Jason Robert Brown. It is a love story that shows love’s ups and downs and everything is said through singing. There are maximum four real conversations where singing is not involved and even though I like musicals, I got a little sick of just hearing music all the time.

The movie starts out with a sad scene when Cathy (Anna Kendrick) is all alone and sings “Jamie is over and Jamie is gone. Jamie’s decided it’s time to move on. Jamie has new dreams he’s building upon. And I’m still hurting.” My first thought was that he was dead but it turned out he wasn’t. The scene is grey and dark but besides this scene, the rest of the movie is very colorful and light. One particular colorful thing that I liked was Cathy’s dresses and shoes. She always wore new outfits and they were all beautiful. Also the scenes filmed outside were very pretty.

After the first scene, the movie goes back five years and shows how the couple’s relationship goes up and down in different situations. It shows how they both try to succeed in their careers and how hard it can be to do so. I found it interesting to see how it can tear on a relationship because of one of the partner’s success. I believe there can be feelings of jealousy and that is not making a healthy relationship .

I liked the songs in the movie a lot and I thought both Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan had good voices. It was very clear though how they were miming and not singing for real. That made the scenes a little fake and it looked kind of weird. Overall though it was a cute movie and I’m glad I watched it.