Sundance 2010 Review: THE ROMANTICS
This review was originally posted on February 7, 2010 as a Sundance Film Festival review.
Score: 6.5/10
Writer/Director: Galt Niederhoffer
Actors: Katie Holmes, Anna Paquin , Josh Duhamel, Elijah Wood, Malin Akerman, Adam Brody, Jeremy Strong, Rebecca Lawrence, Candice Bergen
THE ROMANTICS tells the tale of a group of longtime friends who all come together one weekend at a lake house for the wedding of Tom (Josh Duhamel) and Lila (Anna Paquin). The thing is, they’ve all been friends for so long that they have quite the sordid history with one another. It’s nothing but love, sex, drugs and indie music for a group that calls themselves The Romantics.
Allow me to untangle this tale of star-crossed lovers for you. The budding bride-to-be is the best friend to Laura (Katie Holmes), who happens to have quite a history of her own with the groom. Five years (off and on) of passion to be exact. That puts Laura in quite the hard place as Lila has asked her to be her maid of honor. But that’s not all…
Tom may still be in love with Laura, but he is trapped between a rock and a hard place. The hard place being Lila, who is the safe bet. She’s wealthy, she’s beautiful and she tells him what to do. Bad thing? Not for a guy that can never make up his mind. But then there’s the rock, that being Laura. She encourages him, makes him feel creative, romantic and that love is worth fighting for, and not to mention over, which they do quite a bit.
And so, on the eve of matrimony, Tom is struck with a case of cold feet. Vanishing and subsequently causing the others to go search for him. But what they all find is their years of history, filled with love, hate, sex and sensuality is not quite yet history.
The film plays out like a modern day ST. ELMO’S FIRE with a bit of THE BIG CHILL thrown in for good measure. It explores the idea of what happens when you and your friends move towards the future but never forget the past, with all the best and worst of times that it encompasses. More so, when you reach that point where you must wave goodbye to your younger and more carefree days, where consequences didn’t necessarily exist in that moment, and say hello to reality of making grown-up decisions that do actually effect others around you.
The cast, filled with more young and attractive faces than an US Weekly issue (including Elijah Wood, Malin Akerman, Adam Brody amongst others), all give earnest performances, as the idea that you are watching Mrs. Cruise and Mr. Fergie fades quickly. To boot, they're backed by a fantastic soundtrack made up of Bon Iver and Feist (along with a few oldies but goodies from Van Morrison and The Zombies) that set the scene of love and love lost. On that note, the film is a virtual Vampire Weekend album incarnate (despite not featuring one song from the band), capturing the same ideas and themes of the prepster problems of youth and frivolity.
Unfortunately, the drama gets a little over dramatic at times. It’s wearing to watch rich white kids complain about their troubled lives. But then again, when you're young and emotions run deep, you tend to sweat the small stuff.
Writer/director Galt Niederhoffer wears many hats on the film as, aside from producing it, she also wrote the novel by the same name. She directs the film and its large cast of notable actors with their own styles beautifully, capturing what it is to be young and not getting any younger. Unfortunately, THE ROMANTICS is not pieced together quite as well as it could be, and it loses fluidity at times. It feels as if Niederhoffer had challenges in what to cut out of her 288 page novel to condense for the film adaptation. With that said, it’s not a total detractor or downfall for the film, but it does tend to unravel its seersucker seams in the second act.
In the end, THE ROMANTICS evokes a keen sense of current indie pop and classic 80s films, working to show those same ideas that draw us to said pop culture. Friendship, love, anger, sex, and, of course, drama. And while life may not always be pretty, there always is something quite romantic about it in the dramatics.
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