There's an opera out on the turnpike

The Last Five Years

Crit

What we have here is Sunset Boulevard, and the corpse face-down in the pool at the start is the relationship. The rest of the film is a chronologically scrambled lead-up to the fatal bullet.

Took me a while to concede that singing the story of a young couple in love and then not was more effective than speaking it, but it finally worked for me.

Jamie's dream of success as a novelist comes true in spades; Cathy's acting career is a constant struggle. And therein lies one force driving them apart. But it's a lot more complicated and real than that: she is delighted by his success, and is fine for a while being  part of his train, but how long can that last? And even as he continues to believe in her, how can she keep believing in herself, evidence to the contrary? And then there are the other women.

The chronological skips have them challenged, then happy, then miserable and then happy again, with the payoff of the jumble on the heartbreaking finale. Both are wrong, both are right, and together they are depressingly doomed. Just your standard musical romance, I guess.