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There are lithe, minimal pleasures to be had in glossy pop romance The Idea of You, Amazon’s latest attempt to turn a fan favorite into a broadly appealing date movie. It follows last year’s Red, white and royal blue, a smartphone screen adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s Gay Tramp. In this film, it was the fantasy of the son of a president and an English prince. Here’s a 40-year-old Harry Styles-level mom and pop star, a love-and-lust-blog dream unfolding, both jockeying for space.
It’s a much sleeker and far more satisfying package than the previous one, illuminated by the true movie star power of Anne Hathaway and made with a higher level of craft, from Michael Showalter’s solid studio-level direction to a mostly fluid script. The romcom genre has been said to be “back” for a while now, but that mostly translates to quantity over quality, and while last year’s sleeper smash Everyone but you might have looked the part, it was cursed with dope dialogue, an unfortunate plot, and a disastrously inappropriate female lead. With Hathaway at its center, The Idea of You is on much more secure footing, at small moments almost threatening to be something much grander, but instead settling as a perfectly passable, airplane movie par excellence.
An actor turned writer, Lee was inspired to write the book while falling in love with a boy band’s YouTube video, imagining what her life would be like if she ended up running away with him on tour (Stiles’ fans later claimed him as her own, though Lee denies that he was the main target). Solen (Hathaway) is turning 40, and although she runs a successful gallery in Los Angeles, she is still bruised by her ex-husband’s brutal infidelity and the inevitable divorce that followed.
When Solenn’s ex lets her and teenage daughter Izzy (Ella Rubin) down yet again, she’s forced to step in and trade her solo travel trip for a weekend of babysitting at Coachella. While there, she meets Hayes (Nicholas Galitzin), the baby-faced lead singer of the headline band August Moon. The instant connection turns into an unlikely romance as Solène gives herself to the whirlwind.
It’s easy to see why the source material caught fire with readers, a similar combination of luxurious fairy-tale romance and masturbation wish fulfillment to Fifty Shades (Lee admits to receiving advice from EL James). It’s not as kinky and the movie, according to diehards, isn’t as explicit as the book, but it’s a romantic comedy with an awareness of how important sex can be and how the complexities of how we interact sexually can help define a relationship. The age gap was smoothed over somewhat by the book, with Hayes now 24 rather than 20, but still a major source of anxiety and conflict in the story, Solen made hyper-aware of how she was perceived by those around him and, ultimately account, from a larger audience.
Hathaway’s primal brilliance is such that it doesn’t make us wonder why a 24-year-old heartthrob who could have anyone would be so smitten by an unknown woman old enough to be his mother, and even more so, for to wonder what the 24-year-old is like I wouldn’t The film briefly touches on issues of misogyny and old age, but ever so slightly, Solen’s life is based almost as much on fantasy as Hayes’s (her home is as idyllic as the hotel rooms , in which she went). The script, by Showalter and Jennifer Westfeldt, may have been written with more thought than you’d expect from a streaming romcom—the low bar meant dialogue that almost made sense was a point of applause—but enough to start expecting just a little more texture. . Solen and Hayes are both a little too dreamily constructed to ever feel like real people, and there’s so little interest in any other character in the film that, like a real dream, it can be a little too tightly focused.
There’s probably a trick missed with this one, instead cinemas are skipped to dive headfirst into streaming. Working with what appears to be a fairly substantial budget for the genre, treating us to multiple locations, Showalter manages to make The Idea of You look and breathe like the grander films it comes after, rather than the thinner ones. , next to which he sits. Hathaway, returning to the kind of warm comfort food that many still know and love her for, is a compelling lead with considerable, rare charm, adding more heart and soul to a film that is often in dire need of it. And with Galitzin, a more believable pop star than he was a prince in red, white and royal blue, there’s enough electricity to power us through some otherwise underpowered patches (it also helps that the film’s fake music is loud enough to led us to believe it). All of this ultimately isn’t enough to truly transport us back to the genre’s heyday, but it’s a damn sight better than what we’ve been forced to get used to.
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