Valentine's Day may be a long way off, but here's what your plans should be: going to see Anna Kendrick's new movie The Last Five Years which just got picked up at TIFF. The indie musical film was shopped around at the Toronto International Film Festival before it was scooped up by The Weinstein Company's offshoot RADiUS. Good thing too, because more Anna Kendrick is always better and singing Anna Kendrick is a gift from above.
Not only that, but the plot of the movie actually sounds really interesting. According to Entertainment Weekly, it's based on an off-Broadway play, the story follows the struggling relationship of actress Cathy (played by Kendrick) and writer Jamie (played by Smash's Jeremy Jordan). But unlike standard struggling romance movies, this one operates in two unique timelines. Cathy's story movies backwards from the end of their marriage to the start and Jamie's goes from when they meet to when it all falls apart. The two lines cross only once when Jamie proposes.
As you can probably tell, it's going to be a tear-jerker especially as its premiere is February 14, which already comes with so much baggage. Some may have a hard time seeing Pitch Perfect's Anna Kendrick take on a serious role like this, but she'll crush it because she's done so with emotional scenes in the past. In What to Expect When You're Expecting, which was by-and-large a comedy, Kendrick handled her traumatic miscarriage scene with impeccable acting. She really sells the bereavement to the audience and it's painful to watch her character go through something like that.
Though Kendrick is perhaps best known for her work on the Twilight movies and her comedic Pitch Perfect films, most of her acting work has actually involved a much larger range of emotion like in Happy Christmas when she plays the down-on-her-luck semi drunkard and in Drinking Buddies where she plays an unhappy half of a doomed couple.
Kendrick knows how to tug at an audience's heart strings. If anyone can pull off a depressing romantic movie that debuts on Valentine's Day and makes you hate and love life at the same time, it's Anna Kendrick. And who better is there to spend Feb. 14 with anyway? She just gets me.
