The A-list romcom returns, albeit with only a tentative theatrical release and a prime spot on streaming. (You'd think the powers-that-be might be a bit more confident about these things in the wake of Anyone but You's runaway success, but this version of Hollywood is determined not to learn from its own good news.) Adapted from Robinne Lee's 2017 bestseller, The Idea of You has Anne Hathaway, with her happy-making face and honorable intention of building a career outside the usual franchise channels, as Solene, an LA gallerist and single mother of a certain age; while accompanying her daughter to Coachella - and in the most porous VIP area in corporate music festival history - she crosses paths with British boybander Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), or "Hayes Campbell from August Moon!", as the supporting cast excitedly refers to him. Sixteen years Solene's junior, Hayes confirms the pair's connection while our gal is holding up the backstage meet-and-greet line something rotten. (In the real world, there'd be an insurrection on a par with January 6th.) Issues follow once the characters throw off their lanyards and wristbands and proceed into something approximating everyday life, where Solene finds herself being accused of cradlesnatching - or at least snatching away the figure onto whom the so-called "Mooners", young and not so young, have been so aggressively projecting all these years. How dare she try and turn a fantasy into a reality of sorts?
As the combined Internet appears to have realised over the past few days, the movie's one and only selling point is Hathaway, here shrewdly alighting on material that could only ever further her stardom. The entire second act, post-Coachella, is Solene pouring out her brokenhearted lifestory to her boyish suitor (a posh dolt, with a head like an electric toothbrush, but not uncharming in dispatches, and a good listener besides) in comfy locales; thus unburdened, she can start working through the romcom equivalent of a seven-step program. (Initially bemused by the lad's attentions, she's soon flattered, even giddy, and passing through denial and damp-eyed grief on her way to acceptance and happiness.) It's another notable example of a star almost physically elevating their material - Hathaway even makes funny the credulity-stretching bit wherein a woman with the face and form of Anne Hathaway looks in the mirror and appears not to like what she sees - while communicating what some part of the mass paperback audience connected with in Lee's original tome. Solene is a woman who, after a major romantic failure, no longer understands what makes her beautiful - and, evidently, there are middle-aged women who long to hear proofs of self-worth much as some teenage girls do. The trouble with The Idea of You is that it could only ever work for that select demographic; it offers the rest of us nobody to identify with.
For starters, the kid's never much more than a plot device, and in places barely more than a tape recorder, taking on Solene's words and then playing back what she wants and needs to hear. The supporting characterisation is ungenerous at best. Veep's Reid Scott, bringing some of his now-patented New Clooney swagger to proceedings, is repeatedly frozen out as The Guy Who Did Solene Dirty; his new girl, who wants so badly to be friends with her man's ex, is swatted away like a bug; and the other men in Solene's life are pathetic losers, hung up on their exes or dogs. It's a romcom that contrives to be unrealistic in both its plotting and its expectations: perhaps this is faithful to what folks loved about the book, but what's been brought to the screen, finally, is the perspective of an adult woman who really has got all her hopes pinned on fucking Harry Styles as a means of turning her life around. Actor-turned-director Michael Showalter has ways of dressing up such latent sociopathy: sunny exteriors, aspirational interiors, montages, some unexpected Wang Chung revivalism, plus lots of August Moon songs to show off the fact they shot this at actual festivals before real crowds. Yet where the director's 2017 hit The Big Sick had human frailty to keep things interesting, The Idea of You is so geared towards affirmation from the off that its dramatic stakes are practically zero. The lovers are on and off arbitrarily, at a moment's notice; and the rom-to-com ratio is lopsided throughout. (I had the same thought while fidgeting through The Fall Guy: where have all the gagwriters gone? Surely they can't all have migrated towards animated sitcoms?) You watch it in what's become a recognisable streaming mode - even as it goes in one eye, you can feel the film leaking out your ear, never to be thought of again - and with a newfound appreciation for what Richard Curtis and Roger Michell pulled off in Notting Hill, before the latter passed and the former went off the boil completely.
The Idea of You is showing in selected cinemas, and streaming via Prime Video.
