The Idea of You is the fever dream of one Robinne Lee, whose fan fic about the relationship between Harry Styles, boy band thirst trap, and Olivia Wilde, the mind behind Don’t Worry Darling and Booksmart, ultimately got away from her and turned into a less thirsty straight-to-streaming endeavor by Amazon. I’ve had this movie in my sights for the last few weeks because of the most recent press binge Hathaway has been doing, talking about the craziness of finding the right leading man with chemistry in the bad old days vs. today and just generally looking great for Vanity Fair’s profile.
The premise of the film is that divorced mom of 40, Solène, with a sophomore-aged daughter through a series of shenanigans becomes romantically entangled with a slightly dusty boy band sensation, Hayes Campbell (played by Nicholas Galitzine of Bottoms and Red, White, and Blue fame!, who is apparently also straight). If you plan on watching this movie, come back after the jump, because the rest really requires some digging into the premise of the plot post set up.
Anyway, what ensues is a kind of gruesome grind in which, after the initial glow of the European leg of his farewell/revival tour with the boys, Solène realizes that she’s not really feeling confident enough to continue a relationship with Campbell. Everyone else’s nineteen year old girlfriends are out in two-piece bathing suits, slurping popsicles and some minor indiscretion pushes Solène to recant the entire relationship up until that point. Campbell, ever the picture of restraint and propriety as the mature 24 year old in the relationship keeps his distance after pledging his undying love, and so after a heart-to-heart with her daughter who she’s been gaslighting at an unusually long summer camp, Solène resolves to crash one of Campbell’s recording sessions in order to patch things back up.
This second coupling of their relationship, more public and intentional, is what leads to the media firestorm that probably is supposed to resemble the Wilde-Styles episode, but it’s where a lot of the strangest aspects of the film creep in for me. Solène, unlike Wilde, isn’t famous, so while the intense scrutiny of her personal life might be justifiable in the universe of the story, it really doesn’t stand to reason that there would be intense interest in her daughter after she graduates from high school, which is a major plot point in the movie. It’s the reason why Campbell will eventually suggest the completely bonkers ask of having them revisit their relationship in FIVE YEARS once Solène’s daughter has graduated from COLLEGE and “has her own life,” as if the paparazzi are likely to be tailing that girl through her bachelor’s hoping to catch the ultimate gotcha photo. More on this later.
Solène can’t really work or parent very effectively I guess, which doesn’t matter too much because Campbell is mega wealthy and has already kind of financially bailed her out of one pinch in order to make it easy for her to fangirl across Europe in the fall sequence of their relationship. We’re supposed to feel bad for her that she’s getting all of this unwanted attention, even though it doesn’t really seem to be negatively affecting her in any tangible ways beyond the insufferable behavior of her daughter’s peers who are targeting her at school (mind you, her daughter told her to pursue this relationship and correctly understood that the reason for all the scrutiny was sexism, but for whatever reason her peer-group/friend-network is not strong enough for her to maintain the mother-daughter connection that’s so strong at the beginning of this movie!). So, Solène breaks up with Campbell AGAIN at the airport in a kind of unassailable it’s not you, it’s my daughter argument that feels like it ought to be easier to resolve than by CALLING FOR A FIVE YEAR HIATUS, but what do I know?
Bestie and Wife watched this with me (Bestie watched the opening scene before falling asleep for the rest of the night) and then Wife and I picked up the last half hour of this movie a couple of days later. I remember leaving the first half pretty happy with where things were, the meetcute, the sizzling chemistry, Anne Hathaway’s amazing hair, but in the final minutes of the second half, I couldn’t handle the five year jump.
You cannot assert a five year time jump into the future as a solution to your romcom. Not allowed. There’s actually no way that’s okay. Five years apart isn’t a convenient place to leave two people who have strong feelings for each other, it is the beginning of the fucking montage sequence, and there’s probably at least one if not two moments of emotional betrayal that happen along the way that we should be aware of so we can assess whether or not they are a good match for each other long term! The solution to an age gap romance isn’t to suddenly age up the younger of the two leads so that they’re suddenly acceptably old and mature with a terrible goatee.
JFC, imagine if every time we got to a difficult part of a relationship in a romcom a black screen came up with the text FIVE YEARS LATER and then we zoomed past EVERYTHING INTERESTING to the part where they are suddenly emotionally available and the roadblocks of, uh, children no longer present so much of an issue. Have you ever heard of that study where they asked people if they thought they had changed more in the last 10 years or in the next 10 and people continually underestimated their future transformations in every decade of life? To brush past the next five years is such a cop out for Hathaway’s character, as if she’s been in stasis, waiting for her man to be acceptably old before she’s allowed to date him, as if nothing has changed in her experience or life in that time, all her relationships are stable, unchanging.
So, no, Friend, this is NOT your new “favorite romcom”! You can’t! Not allowed! Try again somewhere else. You just like the idea of this movie, not the movie itself, and hopefully fanfic will give us a better plot soon.
