The Idea of You (Showalter, 2024)
Warning: This review contains plot spoilers. Those who want to avoid in-depth plot points prior to viewing should save this review and read it only after viewing.
Somewhere during the first forty-five minutes of The Idea of You, I started composing an apology review, acknowledging all the cynical assumptions I had going in based on the trailer. Sure this was a gender-reversed Notting Hill knock-off, but the age difference between the characters added a layer of complexity, and Anne Hathaway imbued the whole thing with enough comedic charm to make me forgive the RomCom tropes.
She plays Solène, a just-turned 40 divorced mom who catches the idea of one of the lead singers in her daughter’s favorite boy band. Nicholas Galitzine plays Hayes, the celebrity who is infatuated by that one special person who doesn’t appear to care about his fame (and looks like Anne Hathaway).
I have long maintained that the key fantasy this genre is selling is not that the A-list avatars could fall for average Joes and Josephines (that look like Anne Hathaway or Hugh Grant or Owen Wilson) but that the rich and famous are just as lonely and insecure as everyone else. Turns out that’s not a super hard sell. The insecurity around the flirting stage is perhaps universal, and there are enough celebrity gossip chronicles to remind us that relationships don’t work for them at any greater clip than they do for anyone else. Galatzine and Hathaway give off the appearance of genuine on-screen chemistry, so the parts of the film that land are when the characters take emotional risks, navigating the first stage of attraction in the painfully obvious and obviously painful way. It’s a slightly lighter version of the sublime first act of A Star is Born.
Finally Solène decides to just go for it. The couple has a sexy New York hotel weekend and everything goes so swimmingly that they decide they can’t possibly be together. I jest…sort of. But not really.
Roger Ebert once summed up this genre by saying the classic writing problem was not how to bring the lovers together but how to keep them apart for the duration of the movie. This is a problem that the script doesn’t give much consideration to, so the back half falls into sitcom conventions — paparazzi photos leaked at the wrong moment. Impossible secrets coming to light at just the wrong time. Pedestrian fights that trigger “it’ll never work” pronouncements about a relationship that has supposedly handled worse. The worst thing about The Idea of You is not that Solène and Hayes sometimes act like idiots; it’s that their relationship never appears to manifest the work they put into it during the previous scene. It lives in a world where everything can be undone by a catty remark or a random bystander.
It’s not just Solène’s relationship with Hayes that is all over the place. Her daughter is used (somewhat irritatingly, in my opinion) as a plot device who means the world to Solène except when it is convenient to have her disappear for large swaths of the movie and who loves and supports her mom…except when the movie needs some reason for mom and boyfriend to break up. Argue that teens are fickle, and I’ll agree with you. But shouldn’t a mom and daughter this close have some capability of distinguishing between a bad day and a toxic relationship?
Many years ago Lifetime ran a Project Runway adjacent reality series about the models. One of them, Kojii, won a forever fan in me by eschewing the “I am doing this for my family” rhetoric, in favor of an honest and sensible assertion that she couldn’t credibly tell her daughter to follow her dreams if she never pursued her own. I so, so wanted Kojii to show up at one of Hayes’s concert and beat some sense into the Mom Who Must Sacrifice Any Chance of Happiness for The Good of Her Kid Who Doesn’t Know Any Better. Absent that, maybe Amazon Prime could hire Barbara Kopple or someone to do a “ten years later” documentary about her.
Renewed Spoiler Warnings!
Speaking of ten (or five) years later…Solène and Hayes solve everything in the least convincing way possible, by pulling a Céline and Jesse! Meet you back here in five years to see if you are still interested. It’s not that people couldn’t hold a torch that long that irritates the heck out of me…some clearly do. It’s that the film pretends that this would solve all the couple’s problems when actually it solves none and makes a few more. Will they now trust each other when they couldn’t before? Would the daughter, now in college, suddenly be okay with mom being gossip rag fodder? Or, having grown up with the regular experience of mom giving up her dreams to save her some high-school teasing, would she wonder why she is picking at that scab? Is there any possible best version of the story where the daughter, in finding out what mom did, isn’t plagued by guilt and remorse for an idle comment she made six years ago? Having broken up and gotten back together at least three times, will the couple magically have the maturity to deal with external pressures simply because they are five years older? And if they are, doesn’t this mean on some level that she *was* too old for him? Or was it she that had to grow up, emotionally, rather than physically?
Since I invoked Before Sunrise, why do I have this nagging feeling that Hathaway and Galatzine could have ad-libbed a better second half of the movie? It seemed like they had a fairly solid grasp on their respective characters, and they exerted enough effort to make us care about them. Would I rather have seen these two characters talk honestly to one another about what they were feeling instead of lamenting that their feelings were impossible for some artificial reason? Absolutely.
