The Last Five Years A Moving, Engaging Movie

The Last Five Years is a moving, engaging movie!

Last night, we rented The Last Five Years on Amazon. While the movie was just released in theaters this past Friday, due to it being a limited release, the company also put it on Amazon and iTunes to get to a wider audience.

The Last Five Years is a movie musical that is based on a musical that premiered off-Broadway in 2002 and had another production off-Broadway in 2013.

The movie gives us an inside look at five years in a relationship between aspiring actress Cathy Hiatt, played by the talented Anna Kendrick, and aspiring writer Jamie Wallerstein, played by the exceptional Jeremy Jordan.

When the movie begins, we find Cathy reading a letter from Jamie in which he tells her he is leaving her. “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,” Cathy sings to us in a beautiful, melancholy tone.

From that point on, we see their entire five-year relationship play out, but in an extremely interesting manner. From Cathy’s point-of-view, we see the relationship play out in reverse, whereas from Jamie’s point-of-view, the relationship plays out in the order things happen.

While this is different from the theater production as on stage the characters do not appear together on the stage except for the end and during a wedding scene, we still found it to be a brilliant adaptation of the show. For a show that is clearly so intimate in a theater, it lost none of it’s intimacy in it’s transformation to the big screen.

The cinematic work is visually stunning and perfectly captures the emotional intricacies of each character and each song. When watching the film, you truly feel like you are watching these two character’s real lives play out. This, in large part, can be attributed to the wonderful job that Kendrick and Jordan do in bringing these characters to life.

In addition to the great acting, we have to give Kendrick and Jordan credit for their great singing of the songs. While Jordan’s voice does outshine Kendrick’s at times, they both prove capable of holding their own. They also do a great job at bringing out the emotional depth and complexity of the songs.

As a testament to how great the film was and how much we enjoyed the subtle, intimate nature of it, as soon as it was over, we restarted it and watched it all over again.

We would highly recommend The Last Five Years, as it is a moving, engaging story that will captivate your attention, draw you into it’s characters, and leave you overjoyed with how wonderful a movie musical can be when it’s done right.

To purchase the album or rent/own the movie, click on the below links.