The intermittently uplifting yet just as often pompous The Last Five Years contains hardly any spoken dialogue. Pleasantly containing several songs of depth and wit, the film struggles with the thinnest of storylines and its too-pleased-with-itself structure.
Anna Kendrick, who is very good, presents her character Cathy’s story backwards from the film’s end, while Jeremy Jordan, only fair as Jaimie, goes along in a standard front-to-back arc. (They meet in the film’s middle for their only duet, performed at their wedding.) The chronological device is more cute than terribly effective, and as good as some of the songs are, they fail to overcome the natural obstacle of converting a basically two-character theater construction into a breathing film.
Still, it’s fun to watch Cathy get silly in “A Summer In Ohio,” a tune that sends up her plight as a struggling actress forced to do summer stock. Although Jordan is much less convincing as a hotshot novelist, February filmgoers could do a lot worse than this. The popular off-Broadway production by composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown should add a boost to the rising career of Kendrick, who has been gradually rising up to star status.
You Go Backwards and I’ll Go Forwards….3 (out of 5) stars