I don’t remember when I have been more deeply affected by a film than I was by The Last Five Years, a jewel box of a movie-musical that is unquestionably the best of its kind since Chicago was released in 2003. It is at once a tiny slip of a thing and an emotional blockbuster. Over the course of a brisk 90 minutes, The Last Five Years provides an exhilarating and devastating account of the relationship between a successful young writer and an unsuccessful young actress.
Jamie and Cathy are its only characters. There is almost no spoken dialogue; the movie is sung through. And like the greatest of all sung-through musicals, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), the power of The Last Five Years derives from the pointed contrast between the sweeping romanticism of its beautiful song-score and the unromantic sobriety of its perspective about the evanescence of youthful passion.
The Last Five Years began its life 15 years ago as an extremely problematic off-Broadway musical that centered on a narrative gimmick: Cathy is going back in time while Jamie is moving forward in time. The show’s first song, “I’m Still Hurting,” is about the pain Cathy feels when she finds the farewell letter Jamie has left her in their apartment. The show closes with her ecstatic “I Will Be Waiting,” on the morning after they’ve fallen in love. By contrast, Jamie’s first song, “Shiksa Goddess,” takes place the night they fall in love, and his last, “I Could Never Rescue You,” is sung five years later, as he leaves their marital apartment for the last time.
This sounds ingenious, but it just doesn’t work as a theatrical piece. The two characters are only on stage together twice in the entire show. Otherwise, it’s just one of them on stage, alone, and then another on stage, alone, in a series of static soliloquies.
But those soliloquies! The score by the lyricist and composer Jason Robert Brown is likely the best any American has produced in the past quarter-century. The music is gorgeous and supple, the lyrics witty and sophisticated and bracingly honest.
So it turns out that, after dozens of stagings that could never get it right, what The Last Five Years needed in order to work was fluid camerawork and close-ups. Writer-director Richard LaGravenese has taken Brown’s solos and turned them into dramatic interactions between Cathy and Jamie, mostly filmed out-and-about in a New York City as glowing and inviting as in any Nora Ephron comedy. The movie’s structure is the same as the show’s, but LaGravenese doesn’t make much of the time reversals; you don’t need to understand what year of the last five you’re in to get it. Maybe the dramatic innovations of television storytelling over the past decade have gotten us used to storylines that dart in and out of time, so we don’t need to have it spelled out for us.
Each scene is a song, and each song packs a different kind of punch. You get to know Jamie and Cathy not only from what they say but how they react silently to each other. When all you have is two people on screen, though, those two people had better be worth your time. And oh, are they.
Jeremy Jordan, who, out of nowhere, made a splash on Broadway a few years ago in Newsies, plays Jamie—an offhandedly charming and ragingly ambitious Jewish wunderkind from the suburbs who hits it big as a novelist at the age of 23 just as he meets the gentile girl of his dreams. Jordan manages the almost impossible feat of seeming entirely naturalistic and unaffected even as almost every word out of his mouth is sung. This is a star-making performance, glamorous and seductive and winning in the manner of an old-time Hollywood great.
But the killer here is Anna Kendrick, the star of the smash-hit a cappella comedy Pitch Perfect (2012) and 2010 Oscar nominee for Up in the Air. Her character, Cathy, is a decent, clever, deeply needy woman who is forced to reckon with the fact that she is not going to make it as an artist even as her beloved is becoming a major cultural force.
Like the movie itself, Kendrick is small and unassuming—but then, time and again, this tiny kid with a clarion voice just blows you away. The raw emotions Cathy’s difficult situation generates—pride and envy, love and jealousy, self-sacrifice and self-hatred—are always dancing in and out of Kendrick’s face and eyes. If there were any justice, and we know there isn’t, the Academy would meet today and simply assign next year’s Oscar for Best Actress to her.
The Last Five Years was made for a few million dollars and is unlikely to receive a wide theatrical release. It is available on-demand right now, and given its intimacy and immediacy, it works well on a television or computer screen. Watch it—if only to learn what life is like for Cathy when the only work she can get is at a theater in the sticks: I could shove an ice pick in my eye. / I could eat some fish from last July. / But it wouldn’t be as awful as a summer in Ohio / Without cable, hot water, Vietnamese food, or you.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
