SALON

Friday, Sep 10, 2010 1:30 AM UTC

“The Romantics”: A “Big Chill” for this decade?

Katie Holmes and Josh Duhamel make out and murmur Keats in this slight but intriguing ensemble wedding dramedy

By

Topics: The Romantics, Tom Cruise, J.R.R. Tolkien, Movies,

Josh Duhamel and Katie Holmes

In “The Romantics,” a pleasantly lo-fi ensemble movie written, directed and produced by Galt Niederhoffer (and based on her own novel into the bargain), we’ve got the collision of two or maybe three achingly meaningful narrative and cinematic modes. It’s a wedding movie! It’s a country-house movie! (Arguably, the wedding-at-a-country-house movie, almost always set on the New England coast, is already its own genre.) It’s one of those “Big Chill”-type reunion movies, where an entire generation — or at least its richer, whiter, better-looking microcosm — faces the fact that it’s not as young as it used to be and that its dreams have, alas, turned to dust!

OK, I’m being mean, largely because “The Romantics” is a middling little movie that tries to trespass on Bergman-Renoir territory and simply isn’t adroit enough to pull it off, and because in its weaker moments it’s overheated and silly. Niederhoffer’s title is meant to refer to her characters, whose collegiate clique took on the name thanks to their incestuous dating habits, but also to the Romantics in the English-lit, turn-of-the-19th-century sense. So we get Katie Holmes and Josh Duhamel, as the maid of honor and intended bridegroom, not merely snogging furiously out in the woods on the night before the wedding like a couple of soap opera characters, but also murmuring snatches of “Ode to a Nightingale” into each other’s ears.

Thing is, Niederhoffer manages to sell us this codswallop, or very nearly does. There’s a reason why movies are so often staged around weddings and funerals; the metaphors they offer are meaningful. We’ve all had life crises at weddings, or at the very least drunk way too much and danced long into the night with someone we’ll never see again. There is something about the ritual, about the funny clothes, about the away-from-homeness, that brings buried emotions and repressed libido to the surface. And while Niederhoffer displays no particular aptitude for film direction — the movie’s awkwardly constructed and clumsily edited — she’s got a strong cast full of young Hollywood talent and intimate, imaginative photography by Sam Levy. (He also shot Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy” and Isabella Rossellini’s “Green Porno” series.)

Katie Holmes is probably better known to the public as a celebrity wife and mom than as an actress at this point. That’s genuinely too bad, and she gives “The Romantics” a halfway convincing spine as Laura, a doe-eyed and seemingly fragile New York writer whose old flame, Tom (Duhamel), is about to jump the broom with Laura’s onetime college roommate, the blonder, softer and bosomier Lila (Anna Paquin). Formally, the movie is built around these three characters in old-fashioned playwriting fashion: Collisions between Lila and Laura — the first friendly and the second apocalyptic — bracket the action, with intermediate tension-building encounters between Lila and Tom and then Tom and Laura. (The latter being the one where they’re scrunched up under a tree, mumbling, “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense …”)

Nearly everything that happens amid and among this trio is thoroughly and unfortunately predictable, and Duhamel’s Tom is written as such an irritating Gatsby-Kennedy Northeast Corridor cliché — an Irish-American Ivy League champion swimmer turned Ph.D. candidate — that you have to wonder what the two chicks are fighting over. Surely they can find a future of leafy suburban lawns, country-club memberships, prescription medications and being cheated on without all this sturm und drang on the road to the church.

Despite all that, there’s an interesting texture to “The Romantics” that renders it highly watchable right through to its mystifying conclusion. Levy’s camera roams among these drunken and fatefully uncertain people like an unseen cast member. Holmes’ gritty, agonized central performance is matched by Malin Akerman, who nearly steals the show as the promiscuous and debauched Tripler, who is married to Jake (Adam Brody) but itches to do bad things and mess up as many people’s lives as possible. Rebecca Lawrence is also good as Weesie, a wallflower who reveals hidden depths, but let’s not talk about Elijah Wood’s awkward turn as the drunken, lecherous Chip. (Wood needs to restart his career in Hungary or undergo radical surgery or simply quit — he played a hobbit, and there’s no undoing that fact.)

This isn’t the first young-adult-targeted movie to borrow moods or techniques from the ultra-indie “mumblecore” movement (meaning the films of Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg and various others) and import them into a more commercial narrative form. I wrote exactly the same thing recently about the romantic comedy “Going the Distance,” and this movie is likely to be greeted with the same enormous collective yawn. There’s a larger issue here that we’ll have to talk about some other time, that being Hollywood’s sudden and near-total inability to make coherent and non-insulting movies aimed at adult female viewers. If I’m cautiously suggesting that “The Romantics” is worth your time — at least in a VOD or cable, not-much-else-going-on-tonight sort of way — it’s almost as a discussion topic. This is almost, but not quite, a contemporary relationship drama that might click with younger audiences. But isn’t somebody ultimately going to make that movie? I mean, someday?

 

 

 

 

Andrew O

More Andrew O'Hehir.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 12 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
336 points337 points | 100 comments
vote
How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government -- "...much of the U.S. economic security support system consists of subsidies for the affluent in the form of tax breaks, like those for private retirement savings plans such as 401(k)s and private employer-provided health insurance."
60 points61 points | 3 comments
vote
Temple Grandin on DSM-5: “Sounds like diagnosis by committee.” When it comes to autism, Grandin argues we're paying too much attention to labels -- and not enough to individuals
35 points36 points | 3 comments
vote
Temple Grandin on DSM-5: “Sounds like diagnosis by committee.” When it comes to autism, Grandin argues we're paying too much attention to labels -- and not enough to individuals
33 points34 points | 2 comments
vote
With the help of Photoshop, artist Yao Lu has made shanshui — traditional ink paintings — of China's landfills
30 points31 points | 1 comment

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations