Parents' Guide to The Romantics

It's fitting that a movie about relationship conflict would lead to conflicting feelings for an audience. Part of the movie is an insightful, even touching look at slightly rootless twenty-somethings for whom undergraduate school was a magical time of friendship and intellectual curiosity. But it's also -- and this is that makes The Romantics difficult to watch -- self indulgent and in some ways unbelievable. Six years after college graduation, a group of friends should have evolved at least somewhat past whatever their undergraduate lives were like, without talking about petty grievances from junior and senior year as if they were all that important to their 28-year-old selves. Who cares if Lila -- the much richer, WASPy roommate -- bought the red dress that Laura wanted to wear to some literary magazine event? Is that really on the same level as the fact that Laura and Tom might still be in love, even though it's the day of Lila and Tom's wedding?

The actors all do their best, but Holmes is so broody that she seems like a slightly older Joey from Dawson's Creek. Duhamel is a casting misstep, because although he's perfect as an athletic Alpha Male, Tom is also supposed to be a true scholar-athlete, and Duhamel isn't Matt Damon or Leonardo DiCaprio -- he can't pull off intellectual types very convincingly. Paquin is cloying as the golden princess who usually gets everything she wants, and Candice Bergen, playing Lila's well-heeled mother Augusta, seems to be rivaling Holland Taylor as the "rich patrician mother" in everything. Most disappointing are the quartet of "other best friends," who apparently had no problem reverting to their college-level casualness for hooking up or otherwise being inappropriate with each other, despite being married or engaged. The sole wise ones in the bunch are Lila's drunk brother, Chip (Elijah Wood), who slurs the truth, and younger sister Minnow (Glee's Dianna Agron), who wonders whether Tom really is the right choice for her sister.