While chaperoning her teenage daughter's trip to Coachella, Solène, a 40-year-old single mother, begins an unexpected romance with 24-year-old Hayes Campbell, the lead singer of August Moon, the h...
Guess you can say curiosity killed the cat when it came to getting around to “The Idea of You”, a film about an older women falling for a younger man based on a bestseller from a few years back. Needless to say, I didn’t really get the controversy surrounding it…..
…..and neither do I get whatever hate it’s been receiving.
I’m of two minds on Michael Showalter’s directing, though. On one hand, there’s nothing immediately nerve wrecking or unveiling about his style; nothing overly controlling or too loose with it either. It’s an acceptable congealing of the rom-con style without venturing into autopilot but fleeting on charm on his own machinations without some guidance.
Been a while since I’ve seen a rom-com where the presentation beautifully captures the essence of the narrative since Rye Lane, except here it does so the old fashioned way as opposed to extreme color saturation that mirrors intensity of the characters' feelings. Very naturally well-lit with a vibrant color palette, a decent slew of locations with production design that comfortably mirrored the characters sense of dilemmas and acceptable camerawork that stays warm and intimate throughout, although the shaking of the lens in certain moments is distracting. There’s a certain aplomb to its editing style that called for a nice balance between them, a dearth of surprising laugh-out-loud moments, and whenever hidden exposition comes through for a particular story arc, it does resonate, but there is a slight lack of oomph. On the bright side, both the musical score and soundtrack are very catchy in the best of ways; the film’s actually kinda worth listening to for the soundtrack alone.
Although, some of the dialogue is typical barren drive and it does also bear the question: what the hell was the point of the R-rating because it didn’t feel like one.
Acting-wise, everybody does as well as you expect; only downside is the characters they’re stuck with have little to work with. As per usual, it’s up to the actors’ experience and chemistry to bring the underdeveloped characters to life and it’s a test Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine pass with flying colors. There’s a lot of silent restraint in their performances that help them stand out from the rest and it helps how their awkward chemistry elicits more tenderness than the standard rom-com.
To say I didn’t expect much out of this story would be putting it mildly; you could literally count every cell in your body how many rom-com’s go the way this one does. Yes, the conveyor belt of cliches don’t really add up, and gets really tedious as they repeat the same ‘Will they, won’t they’ lipstick battles again. But, there’s just enough context here for the audience to decipher an actual narrative with enough depth to pass without constantly jumping the shark and it’s thankfully never short on momentum. It paints itself as carefree from a distance and is adapted for a faster pace, which it does achieve, but what we get is every bit as formulaic as you expect and it harbors no illusions towards what its endgame is.
It resonated and maintained a cheeky but earnest personally with me as it delved into the complexities of age-related relationships, striking a chord with how societal judgments can shape our experiences and influence our loved ones. Society has made a constant habit out of ridiculing and criticizing women for literally anything and gladly falling back on hypocrisy to further tear them down when they succeed (something the Barbie movie made clear gloriously) and we can see how paranoid that might make someone who’s always been weary and cautious on how others view them. Between the verbal abuse an older woman takes if she dates a much younger man and the realities of balancing parenthood and social life on top of the role of paparazzi and social media in inflaming any of those situations, it quickly equips an otherwise lightweight rom-com with just enough insightful musings about the process of maturity and celebrity caging and I’m glad it doesn’t go the sleazy route of making either of them look ridiculous for having desires and fantasies of their own.
Yes, it spews that type of exposition a lot but it does a fair bit of showing off of its feminist undercurrent a little as well so it’s not completely lazy in expressing its social commentary and staying tethered to its emotional core, especially as a good chunk of these moments feel more restrained then what these movies normally offer us.
Unfortunately, besides the cliches, the ending perplexed more than I thought it would. Thankfully, the best thing it has going for it is that it’s mildly better than the book’s ending because at least it gives us some faint glimmer of hope for the two. My issue though isn’t that they dragged it out (I sort of expected that anyway), it’s HOW they decided to do it. Some people are willing to wait for love, to let the extremities of their situation die down and blow over, long distance relationships or otherwise. Here, it just feels odd.
I say that because given the issues they addressed here, them just rushing through the drama and immediately resolving everything diminished a bit of the goodwill it established for itself. Decisions mount up, pressure begins to break the characters down…..and then it’s just gone. Why?
But overall, I’m surprisingly proud to say this surpassed my modest expectations.
