With an ensemble cast of doe-eyed beauties and dark-haired gentleman, scenes set predominantly in the pitch black nighttime hours of a rural New England estate, and a script which has its characters quoting Keats and pondering the value of their lives to date, The Romantics is a film for those who have always had a thing for the tall, the dark, the brooding, and the handsome. It is not about "happily ever-afters." It is not about soul mates. Rather, it is about uncertainty, emotion, and the often concurrent and conflicting desires for security and stability and inspiration and excitement.

Reuniting seven college friends for the first time in years for a rehearsal dinner, a wedding, and the hours in between, The Romantics is a film filled with its fair share of late-twenty-something angst. For the four friends who are now couples (two married and two together for as long as anyone can remember), their relationships are both a source of contentment, and, as we see as the night goes on, an ever-so-slight desire for something different. For all, the years that have passed since they were last all together have been a mix of seeming accomplishments and an accumulation of events that somehow fail to satisfy. For Laura (Katie Holmes), the Maid of Honor and lone single gal of the bunch, added to the mix is a series of subpar relationships that have never lived up to the to the one she had with the groom, Tom (Josh Duhamel), until shortly before he began dating Laura's college roommate and his bride, Lila (Anna Paquin). And, as you might guess, for Tom, seeing Laura—with whom he didn't quite completely cut off things when while he was dating Lila—quickly turns him into more than just a bit of a nervous groom.

However, while the premise of the film seems one set up to pit commitment versus passion and the wife/girlfriend against the other woman, that is not what The Romantics is about. As I found myself increasingly pulled to root for Laura over Lila, it wasn't because I do not believe in the sanctity of marriage or the value of a relationship slightly less volatile than that of Romeo and Juliet. And even as the probability of a wedding ceremony that ends with a newly married couple becomes slimmer and slimmer as the night goes on, the forces that increasingly pull the course of events away from such an outcome are less about the desire to be freed from the bonds of commitment in order to grasp excitement but for the longing for a commitment and relationship within in which freedom might be found.

At the beginning of the movie, the atmosphere is one of restraint and insincerity. As the group arrives at Lila's family estate, the elephant that is Tom and Laura's past relationship is blatantly ignored as everyone exchanges cries of excitement, joy, and overwhelming love for each other. At the rehearsal dinner, toasts ring of clichèd sayings, paint a picture of Lila and Tom as two perfect people who come together to make a perfect couple, and come to a close with Laura's dreadfully uncomfortable well-wishes which, try as hard as they may to paint Lila and Tom as the perfect match, dreadfully fail. In the film's funniest and (in my opinion) best scene, Lila herself reveals just how awkward the iron fist of control and façade that seems to hold everyone in its grasp is as she removes one cigarette, one Hershey's Kiss, and one tiny bottle of liquor from her dresser drawer and takes one drag, one bite, and one sip—all the while seemingly on the verge of a nervous breakdown—before putting them right back and heading to her bed to sit in silence while her friends and fiancè wander the grounds and actually give into a few nerves.

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