Here's to the film romances that capture the indecision of the human heart

May’s pitch-black comedy of manners is a hilarious send-up of male delusion that just avoids the pitfall of turning Lenny into a joke; a balancing act that many films have aimed for but few have nailed. (That includes a terrible remake starring Ben Stiller in 2007.) Still, several rom-coms have tried to walk a similar tonal tightrope when it comes to impending fatherhood.

Hugh Grant is a bit of a Lenny Cantrow in Chris Columbus’ Nine Months. We’re meant to laugh but also empathize as he’s sent reeling when his long-time girlfriend (Julianne Moore) announces that she’s pregnant. Unfortunately, the film lacks either the comedy chops or the humanity to make its exploration of his yuppie indecision work. A better riff is Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, in which Seth Rogen captures a much more successful portrait of the modern manchild—especially once the movie establishes that Rogen’s character is only 23 years old. Indeed, Knocked Up hits the sweet spot of laughing both with and at its shaggily lovable male lead. The only problem is that he gets the interesting arc of maturation while Katherine Heigl is left as the less nuanced, more reactive obstacle to his growth.

Perhaps that’s why the lower stakes of pre-wedding “cold feet” is a slightly easier topic for Hollywood to get right. In Rick Famuyiwa’s The Wood, lifelong friends Mike (Omar Epps) and Slim (Richard T. Jones) have to hunt down their buddy Roland (Taye Diggs) when he goes missing on the morning of his wedding. And it’s the power of friendship—and a whole bunch of childhood memories—that gets him back on track; a sweet solution for a charming little coming-of-age story. 

Then, two weeks after The Wood hit theaters, Garry Marshall delivered his own “cold feet” rom-com with Runaway Bride—a rare female-centric riff on The Heartbreak Kid formula. Julia Roberts’ Maggie Carpenter has left a trio of fiancés at the altar and will lose two more before the movie is over. But that’s mostly because she’s so caught up in the idea of finding the right guy and reshaping her personality to match his that she doesn’t actually know herself at all. It’s a similar riff on the themes of identity and indecision at the heart of May’s film, even if Marshall bends them in a much schmaltzier direction. Where Lenny Cantrow is left to suffer under his choices, Maggie just needs time to learn how she likes her own eggs before she can join someone else’s kitchen.

The growing-in-parallel romances

The most interesting version of these indecisive romances is the one where multiple protagonists have their own growing up to do—not exactly together but in parallel to one another. As with Nichols and May’s contributions to New Hollywood, it’s a trend that tends to re-emerge whenever a new wave of indie cinema breaks through, as it did in the 1990s. 

After Richard Linklater helped launch that indie boom with his early ensemble comedies, he turned to romance in his beloved Before trilogy. And while all three films are captivating in their own way, it’s in the middle chapter, Before Sunset, where the stakes feel highest. We know from their magical first encounter that Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) have incredible chemistry. But the first film ends on a cliffhanger, leaving the second film to answer whether Jesse and Céline were willing to take a leap for each other—and what they’ll do now that they’ve got a second chance to make a different choice. 

That idea of growing in parallel—and the question of whether you should risk what you have to go after something else—also takes center stage in two early 2010s mumblecore films with some Before naturalism in their DNA: Joe Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies and Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister. Shelton’s film is about friendship, grief, siblinghood, and the unsaid things that keep people apart because they’re scared of what making a choice might mean. Meanwhile, Swanberg is interested in deconstructing the kind of “manic pixie dream girl” fantasy that keeps people perpetually running towards something else rather than realizing what they have right in front of them. 

Over the past few years, it’s been indie darling Celine Song who’s taken up the indecisive romance mantle. Where Marty Supreme and The Heartbreak Kid are about running away in big, explosive, male-egocentric ways, Song is more interested in the quiet, introspective way women dream about the paths not taken. Both Past Lives and Materialists explore questions of what it means to leave someone and what it means to stay. And while they’re ostensibly love triangles, they first and foremost use that classic rom-com story structure as the backdrop for character studies about internal growth and the importance of truly knowing yourself before finding your forever partner. 

Decades of big-screen rom-com storytelling may have sold the fantasy of being saved by someone else’s love, but sometimes the real romantic fantasy is the power of making your own choices—of walking the wrong path before you figure out the right one. It’s a different kind of love story than Hollywood usually pushes, yet indecisive rom-coms can be just as powerful (and probably a whole lot more truthful) than any fairy-tale romance.