Taglines: Nothing complicates friendships like love.
Five former college friends travel for the wedding of the wealthy Lila Hayes with Tom McDevon at her family’s beach house. The maid of honor Laura Rosen was the roommate of Lila in the college and the groom Tom was her boyfriend. Laura still misses Tom and the groom is not sure that he shall marry Lila. Along the eve of the wedding day, they have a dinner rehearsal and drink a lot of booze, and Tom and Laura get close to each other and rekindle their love.
The Romantics is a romantic comedy film based on the novel of the same name by Galt Niederhoffer, who also wrote the screenplay and directed the film. Starring are Katie Holmes, Anna Paquin, Josh Duhamel, Malin Akerman, Adam Brody, Dianna Agron, Rebecca Lawrence Levy, Candice Bergen, Elijah Wood, Rosemary Murphy, Evelyn Aronin and James K. Schaffer.
Film Review for The Romantics
One of the rich, adrift Yale chums in Galt Niederhoffer’s second novel never quite managed to apply to film school after graduation. But he did buy expensive screenwriting software, read part of its manual and write an unfinished script “about a clique of college friends who reunite at a funeral.” This little self-referential nugget is nicely buried in “The Romantics,” Ms. Niederhoffer’s book about a clique of college friends reuniting at a wedding.
So Ms. Niederhoffer, whose arch, earlier book was “A Taxonomy of Barnacles,” has a humorous perspective on “The Romantics” from the very start. Some of that humor is born of futility: she knows there have been variations on the same premise. Yet she perseveres, enjoying the opportunities for acerbity that this evergreen format can offer when its focus is the nuptials staged by a wealthy WASP family at its summer mansion in Maine. The matriarch has contributed both “meticulous planning and rabid prayers” to bless the wedding with perfect weather.
Ms. Niederhoffer sees the Hayes family as “a group that provided ample proof on its own of the importance of affirmative action.” If that sounds like an outsider’s perspective, it is: some of “The Romantics” is seen through the eyes of the one Jewish wedding guest. Her name is Laura, and her sharp eye for the Hayeses’ tribal habits is this book’s main source of entertainment. When the bride’s mother, Augusta, greets her with the words “Laura, don’t you look wonderful,” Laura understand that this is not so much a compliment as a question.
In a plot twist that seems to come straight from the screenwriting software, Laura happens to be the old flame of Tom, the uneasy groom. “He had green eyes, brown hair and shoulders built to comfort a weeping girl,” the book says of Tom. “On the basis of looks alone, he could have bedded an entire field hockey team.” That Laura lost Tom to the flawlessly pretty Lila Hayes, who now “welcomed her friends as guests to her club, so long as they remembered who was the member,” leaves Laura “forcing a merry smile that only an idiot could mistake for real cheer.”
Six years after college, the old friends gather to dissect one another’s successes and failures amid the rocky, picturesque tranquillity of this Maine island. All of them are sharp-eyed enough to know whose family “landed on the wrong side of Plymouth Rock” and who has been favored by fortune. One of the guests “was perfectly suited for the job she’d secured at The Boston Globe, but her journalistic skills were sharpest when she was gossiping about her friends.” One is apt to drink too much and exclaim, “Let’s get naked and go crabbing!” One (Laura), on the eve of the nuptials, revels in “the special distinction of being the second prettiest girl in the room and, as of tomorrow, the most available.”
As Ms. Niederhoffer clearly knows, the fun in such stories comes from quick, withering observations rather than plot mechanics. In terms of overall narrative, after all, almost nothing can happen. Yes, Tom can have doubts and can be reattracted to Laura. He can disappear from the island before the wedding, prompting the worst fears even though he is known to be a strong swimmer. And Augusta, the book’s most deliciously malevolent character, can speculate endlessly and snobbishly about her visitors without becoming the least bit tiresome. Augusta is capable of growing indignant about iceberg lettuce when Tom’s family puts it on the menu at the rehearsal dinner.
“The Romantics,” which has a witty cover (a lush antique botanical drawing of a rose, torn in half and then mended with fuzz-flecked cellophane tape), manages to be more entertaining than many other such stories without being notably more original. The major contrivance here involves breaking up the visiting couples with a mix-and-match arrangement that leaves everyone poised for drunken late-night betrayals. These arrive on cue, as does the emergent strain of cruelty that prompts one character to insist: “Come on, you guys. Let’s not get ‘Lord of the Flies’ on each other.”
And as the book raises the question of whether Laura, well aware of Tom’s ambivalence, will be capable of “mansion-wrecking,” it also contemplates these friends’ dashed romantic ambitions. One of them grew up in Boston dreaming of being a poet. (“Hours were clocked in Cambridge cafes; moleskin journals filled with poems about the violet hour.”) Now he has stopped writing, works for a hedge fund and is maneuvered into undermining his marriage during the course of the wedding idyll. And ambivalence emerges as the most daunting enemy of romantic passion. “Ambivalence was arguably stronger than love,” Augusta thinks once she stops dwelling on the table centerpieces and begins seriously contemplating her daughter’s destiny. “It thrived like a germ until death.”
As that may indicate, “The Romantics” offers more cynicism than flights of romantic fancy. But it is well enough executed by Ms. Niederhoffer to illustrate why well-wrought cynicism never goes out of style.
The Romantics (2010)
Directed by: Galt Niederhoffer
Starring: Katie Holmes, Anna Paquin, Josh Duhamel, Malin Akerman, Adam Brody, Dianna Agron, Rebecca Lawrence Levy, Candice Bergen, Elijah Wood, Rosemary Murphy, Evelyn Aronin, James K. Schaffer
Screenplay by: Galt Niederhoffer
Production Design by: Tim Grimes
Cinematography by: Sam Levy
Film Editing by: Jacob Craycroft
Costume Design by: Danielle Kays
Set Decoration by: Robert Covelman
Art Direction by: Jeremy Rosenstein
Music by: Jonathan Sadoff
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, partial nudity, language and some drug material.
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
Release Date: September 10, 2010