Let us now praise Anna Kendrick, who is positively great in the small-scale “The Last Five Years’’ — so utterly wonderful that this adaptation of an off-Broadway musical deserves better than a token theatrical release to support its distribution via video-on-demand.
What’s remarkable is that Kendrick delivers almost all of her performance through song and gestures in a film with practically no dialogue. She plays Cathy, a struggling New York City actress who mourns the end of her five-year marriage in an opening number that’s heartbreaking because of the emotion she invests in it.
What follows is a series of flashbacks documenting that once-happy marriage to Jamie (Jeremy Jordan), a novelist who early on achieves the kind of success that keeps eluding the insecure Cathy.
Like the show, the film alternates between numbers featuring him — which are told in chronological order — and numbers with her (which play out backward from the present). They meet in the middle for a duet.
Anna Kendrick in “The Last Five Years.”Thomas Concordia The music for Jason Robert Brown’s songs sounds kind of generic, but his lyrics are bitingly clever and they provide a great showcase for Kendrick, who showed off her serious musical chops as Cinderella in “Into the Woods.”
Broadway veteran Jordan is almost as good a singer as she is, but he’s not a good enough or charismatic enough actor (at least on the screen) to flesh out his thinly sketched character, who succumbs to the temptations of success even as it drives a wedge between him and his beloved wife.
Kendrick does the dramatic heavy lifting here as a woman struggling to break free from her husband’s large shadow and find her destiny.
She nails the comedy as well — especially in a hilarious song about doing summer stock in Ohio. Her priceless reactions even help make Jordan’s endless Isaac Bashevis Singer-style Christmas number tolerable.
It’s not hard to see why “The Last Five Years’’ is getting the bum’s rush in theaters — there is nothing especially distinctive about Richard LaGravenese’s direction or script.
But to his credit, he does stage Kendrick’s numbers with minimal editing — and that, my friends, is why you should seek out this little movie.
