(1996) Returning by bus from New York City, where he plays piano in clubs, to his hometown of Knight's Ridge for a ten-year high-school reunion, Willie Conroy (Timothy Hutton) stays with his downer dad and bummer brother Bobby in his old bedroom in their lonely house without a mother and meets up with his secondary-school buddies, none of whom has gone to college. Of the old gang only Michael "Mo" Morris (Noah Emmerich), who picks Willie up at the Greyhound terminal and delivers him to the doorstep, has settled down with wife Sarah (Anne Bobby) and kids.

It's December (odd time for a school reunion) and snowing; Tommy "Birdman" Rowland (Matt Dillon) has a snow-removal business with his two friends, Paul Kirkwood (Michael Rapaport) and Kev (Max Perlich), as employees. Trying to have it both ways like he did in high school, Tommy's diddling Darian nee Smalls (Lauren Holly), his old girlfriend from when he was king of the campus, who's married to Steve Rossmore (Sam Robards) with a little girl, as well as Sharon Cassidy (Mira Sorvino). Gina Barrisano (Rosie O'Donnell) reads Sharon the riot act: "cobwebs in your womb" with a man who can't commit.

Motivated when his girlfriend of seven years takes an interest in a meat cutter, Paul (who lives in the same house with Tommy who says of him: "I've got roaches; I've got termites; I've got Paul") presents Jan (Martha Plimpton) with a ring and marriage proposal in the restaurant where she waitresses, only to get turned down and told that he needs to make a decision based on what he wants, not on what he doesn't want.

Next door to Willie's childhood home where a new family has moved in he makes acquaintance with a nosy, very precocious thirteen-year-old girl, Marty (Natalie Portman, actually 15), who develops a crush on him.

At the Johnson Inn, under the proprietorship of their classmate Stanley "Stinky" Womack (Pruitt Taylor Vince), Willie and the boys - Paul, Kev, and Tommy - make acquaintance with Andera (Uma Thurman), Stan's babe of a cousin from Chicago, and sing out of key to Willie's plinking the ivories, "Sweet Caroline."

In Mitch's convenience store, Gina, picking up a copy of Penthouse, reads the riot act to Tommy and Willie: "Yeah, that's nice right? Well, it doesn't exist ok…. And the tits, please! I could hang my overcoat on them…. These are silicon city. And look, my favorite, the shaved pubis.… This is a mockery, this is a sham…. Implants, collagen, plastic, capped teeth, the fat sucked out, the hair extended, the nose fixed, the bush shaved... These are not real women, all right? They're beauty freaks. And they make all us normal women with our wrinkles, our puckered boobs, hi bob, and our cellulite feel somehow inadequate. Well I don't buy it, all right? But … if there's a chance in hell that you'll end up with one of these women, you don't give us real women anything approaching a commitment. It's pathetic. I don't know what you think you're going to do. You're going to end up eighty-years old, drooling in some nursing home, then you're going to decide, it's time to settle down, get married, have kids? What, are you going to find a cheerleader? Charge it Mitch."

At the VFW where Sharon has organized a surprise birthday party for Tommy, Darian ("It was your special night, Tommy") walks in drunk; when he drives her home, she explains that Steve is away and Kristen is spending the night elsewhere and suggests: "You can slip into something more comfortable…. Me."

Failing to seduce Andera at the piano, following her date with Paul (taking her to a bar to show off in front of Jan), Willie convinces her to go with him to the ice-fishing shack where she describes her expected future back in Chicago (ice-cold martinis, Van Morrison, Sunday papers); he admits his dread of marriage ("the big fade") and his lawyer girlfriend Tracy Stover's (Annabeth Gish) driving down to accompany him to the reunion.

To Willie's saying the photos look creepy and should be removed, Paul proclaims a paean to the pinups of beautiful girls on his bedroom walls: "Supermodels are beautiful girls, Will. A beautiful girl can make you dizzy, like you've been drinking Jack and Coke all morning. She can make you feel high full of the single greatest commodity known to man - promise. Promise of a better day. Promise of a greater hope. Promise of a new tomorrow. This particular aura can be found in the gait of a beautiful girl. In her smile, in her soul, the way she makes every rotten little thing about life seem like it's going to be okay. The supermodels, Willy? That's all they are. Bottled promise. Scenes from a brand new day. Hope dancing in stiletto heels."

The standout scene, however, occurs - after Willie has said to Mo, "I just want something beautiful," who has just told Willie that Marty was a "zygote when you were in the 7th grade" - between Willie and Marty (Romeo and Juliet) at the outdoor skating pond near the ice-fishing shack. "You'll go to the penitentiary," says Marty, "I'll be the laughingstock of the Brownies." When she asks him, "Wait five years," he replies, associating her with Christopher Robin: "I can't be a Pooh."

Interrupting the reunion festivities, Mo of all people announces that Tommy's been beaten up, calling on his pals to join him in a rumble, though Willie futilely raises the point of there being "a moral dilemma," since Tommy isn't all that innocent.

After more than 40 years I haven't been to any of my high school's reunions, but I'm glad I didn't miss this one from director Ted Demme and screenwriter Scott Rosenberg (though I didn't get to it until nearly 14 years late). Coincidence? In ABC's October Road, Knights Ridge, Mass., is the fictional hometown.

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