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

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 01:30:00 +0000

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.

Why we need more “adult” movies

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:28:00 +0000

Early in "The Romantics," writer-director Galt Niederhoffer's film about a group of 30-something college friends reuniting for a wedding, there's a scene where the bride-to-be, Lila (Anna Paquin), goes up to her room following the rehearsal dinner, sits on her bed, and takes off her high-heeled shoes. The camera stays on her as she sits there collecting her thoughts, listening to the sounds of the house, and to her friends talking on the lawn below, preparing for a night of drunken tomfoolery. After a moment Lila stands up, walks to the window and looks down at her friends as if debating whether to join them. There's no score, just natural sound. There are no cuts, either. Niederhoffer isn't afraid of inaction, of visual and aural quiet that verges on dead space; the entire scene lasts somewhere between a minute and 90 seconds, during which she's not hurriedly advancing the plot. She's luxuriating in a moment.

Salon.com > The Romantics

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

Why we need more “adult” movies