Too Twee and Surreally Saccharine

The Five-Year Engagement was a great movie. The way it combined goofball humour with a realistic portrayal of the ups and downs of 21st century romance was artful and thoroughly enjoyable. It was further buoyed by the heavy use of Van Morrison songs.

Morrison's most important appearance on the movie's score is as the soundtrack for the main couple's meet-cute at a New Years Eve party with Van Morrison's poignant "Sweet Thing" playing in the background. The scene is flashed-back to repeatedly as a synecdoche for the couple's deep and abiding connection.

Here's the problem, though: there is no way "Sweet Thing" would ever get played at a New Years Eve party in a club around midnight. "Sweet Thing" is the type of song you hear the first minute of as a bride walks down the aisle. Jason Segel basically admitted as much in this GQ interview where he describes the opening strings (the strings!) on the Van Morrison album in question (1968's Astral Weeks) as "absolutely beautiful" and mentions "Sweet Thing" in his answer to a question about what his wedding playlist would sound like.

"Sweet Thing" is not a song that you see drunk twenty-somethings exchange spit to on the sloshiest night of the year. As a moviegoer, when I first saw that scene I was prepared to overlook the absurdity that the characters could converse at a normal human volume in that environment and I could even stomach the possibility that someone who looked like Emily Blunt would give Jason Segel the time of day. But it was the use of that song which ultimately undermined any air of reality to their encounter:

"Sweet Thing" is soft. It has little percussion (and what little it does have is irregular). It sounds sad. It has a string section. In fact, here is Van Morrison himself describing the nature of the song:

"It contemplates gardens and things like that...wet with rain. It's a romantic love ballad not about anybody in particular but about a feeling." 

None of these elements lend themselves to dancing at a raucous New Years Eve party where people normally dance to songs with the word "party" right in the title. Granted, there were a lot of white people there so maybe the person in charge of tunes was trying to save people from embarrassing themselves on the dance floor, but it would still be a record-scratch moment if a bold-to-the-point-of-foolishness DJ ever tried to pull that song off in such an environment.

Which is all bad for the movie because having the couple meet at a New Years Party in silly costumes was a nice idea and so was pairing it up with that wonderfully romantic song. If I was a more charitable reviewer I might even chalk it all up to the filmmakers intentionally highlighting their theme that it is hard to achieve the ideal of the classic love affair within the constraints of modern reality. But I doubt it.