Guys, it's time to have a talk about adaptations (WARNING: RANT AHEAD)
While most people flooded the movie theaters to see the ungodly abomination known as Fifty Shades of Gray, I spent my Valentine's Day night watching the little musical movie adaptation of The Last Five Years. If you are not a musical theater person like me, you probably have no clue what this is. Well, this is a movie based on the popular Off-Broadway musical of the same name. It was written by star-composer and musical genius Jason Robert Brown, and it's based on his failed marriage. It details the journey of struggling actress Cathy (Anna Kendrick) and rising, talented writer Jamie (Jeremy Jordan) from falling in love and getting married to the Jamie's success and their distance getting in the way and eventually breaking the relationship.
Adaptations are always hard to make. If you know me personally, you have heard the numerous rants I have about this, but a good adaptation needs to be a perfect combination of the spirit and themes of the source material while adding something new. Some of the best musical adaptations have greatly differed from the source material (think Sound of Music, Chicago and even Grease) but they added new things and brought the story to life on the big screen. However, this is easier said than done with this play as there are a couple things that make it unique.
First and simplest: it’s a sung-through musical, like something like Les Miserables. Sure, there is some dialogue, but this really ain't your regular "book" musical. And I understand a lot of people can get turned off by that. But let's get this out of the way, DONT COMPLAIN ABOUT THERE BEING TOO MUCH SINGING IN A MUSICAL. EVER. JUST DONT. It's one of the stupidest things in the world to me. Musicals are a genre just like comedy is a genre, and sung-through musicals (or operettas) are a sub-genre just like black comedy is a subgenre. If you don't like that type of movie, that's fine, but don't boast about how much this particular movie sucks JUST because it's a sung-through musical. You knew what you were getting into and still paid to see it, honey.
But the main thing that stands out for this show is its non-linear storytelling. In the stage version, there are only two actors, Cathy and Jamie, and the story is told in a series of solos from each character's point of view on opposite sides of the stage and a spinning center, leaving the audience to fill in the details. However, there's a twist: their stories are told in reverse chronological order. Cathy (who is stuck in the past and doesn't understand what went wrong) tells the story from the breakup to their first date and Jamie (who is the one to leave and move on) starts from the beginning of their relationship until the end. They only meet in the middle at the moment he proposes. This show's story and music are some of the most deep and beautifully poignant pieces of theater in recent years. AND THEN THIS MOVIE HAPPENED.
Oh god how I wanted to love this movie. I heard a few bad things, but I really, really wanted to like it. UGH but I felt so conflicted. There are many parts of a really good movie. Anna Kendrick is delightful as usual and Jeremy Jordan is a ball of energy in his first film performance (although admittedly he gets the less sympathetic character in this story); they both sound really great too, with Jordan almost surpassing the vocals of the original Jamie (Nobert Leo Butz). And the songs are still breathtaking. But the story hurts my soul.
When the announcement for this movie first came out, I remember thinking to myself, "In the stage versions they sometimes have screens that put the date and location plus they have that whole 'two-actor spotlight' thing going on to tell apart the two story lines. I wonder how they are going to take that into the screen." And the answer is...they don't. For the most part that is. Although some scenes in their apartment play around with the lighting and Jamie gets a haircut, there aren't very good transitions between Cathy's storyline and Jamie's. This is especially hard since now the characters talk and sing to each other and they change settings and move and do things. Hell sometimes in the middle I WAS CONFUSED on which storyline we were on. I didn't see it with anyone who wasn't familiar with the show before, but my guess is that they wouldn't have realized the story structure for a while and even then they would have been a little confused. But really there is barely anything! The movie was basically little music videos of the songs. This choice definitely alienated a large portion of its already very small audience
They didn't make any bold changes really, other than them singing to each other, which could almost feel redundant in songs like “See I'm Smiling" where you really don't need to add dialogue for Jamie as we can tell better from what Cathy is saying. Or the whole "Next Ten Minutes" sequence which didn't fit in Cathy's ending part well at all. However, sometimes it did. That's not so say it was always so bad. Jamie's "Shmuel Song" which always vexed me as it stopped the story dead in its tracks, was a delightful surprise when brining in Anna Kendrick's Cathy to interact with Jamie which created a sweet moment in the early stages of their relationship. It was also very interesting to see Cathy really pushed aside to Jamie's career during the party scenes.
SEE MY STRUGGLE? Remnants of a good movie are everywhere! But the bad parts stick out too much to be ignored. I still don't quite know how to feel about it. The really devoted fan and theater puritan part of me begs to ask the question: should this have even been made at all? There's a reason why the original TL5Y didn't go to Broadway and why we can't seem to make a good, feature-length Dr. Seuss adaptation...Maybe some works don't translate well into other media and should be left alone to exist in their own medium. .. But I don't know. Maybe if it had better direction it could have flowed better and have a coherent narrative for newcomers. Take a musical like Chicago (in my opinion, the best musical adaptations of recent memory) which, although it follows a linear storyline, is unconventional in that all the musical numbers happen in the main character's mind. Choices like starting the movie with a shot that goes into her eye and reveals the title, or making all the musical numbers be on stages with dazzling make-up and lights while the rest of the story looked normal made a world of difference. And again there are many good moments in this movie and I'm glad I at least saw it.
I'm sorry I don't have an answer to my own questions. But I will say that I hope this movie inspires people to look up the original work and appreciate it the way I did. I know I can't expect the same impact that something like Les Mis had, but it's nice to hope. And I do hope people keep in mind that, media are different for a reason and you have to leave things behind and add others to make it fit into a different medium. You can't leave it the same way because then you're stuck with a movie like this that looks and sounds very pretty, but doesn't leave the same impact.
OR you could make the Producers movie again...and you DO NOT want to go there.
