The May-December romance gets the lightweight rom-com treatment in Michael Showalter’s The Idea of You. Starring Anne Hathaway as the December (yes, 40 is the new old age I suppose) and Nicholas Galitzine as the May, I would venture to say that since both are elegantly beautiful people, the idea of age doesn’t really matter here. It’s a plot contrivance in a toothless comedy that shows just enough horniness between the two before revoking back into a harmless romance of will-they-or-won’t-they.
The best thing about the film is Hathaway. Showing flashes of movie-star acuity in many of her scenes, her Solene acts circles everyone else here. Introduced as the hip mother to teenage daughter Izzy (Ella Rubin) because she sings along to St. Vincent in the car, Solene is eventually forced to chaperone her and a group of friends to Coachella. There, a meet-cute happens with the 19 year old Hayes, the lead singer of a pop group named August Moon, played by Galitzine, when her VIP pass accidentally steers her to his trailer mistaken for a restroom.
Of course, Hayes falls madly in love with her (who wouldn’t?) and abruptly changes the set list of his show to serenade her from the stage, which Solene manages to find charming but ultimately harmless. Things get less harmless when Hayes shows up at her art studio the next day and virtually buys her out.
From that moment on, he pursues her, and Solene falls into a relationship with the pop star that sees them jet setting around the world, avoiding the paparazzi and, most damaging, keeping the relationship secret from her teenage daughter.
Certain moments and scenes in The Idea of You are charming and effective. Many are not. Director Showalter has a history of helming modern romance pictures, and some like The Big Sick (2017) and Spoiler Alert (2022) shine through the creaky confines of the genre with real heart while others such as The Love Birds (2020), fall short of any originality. The Idea of You is somewhere in between all of these. The biggest problem I had with the film was the desire to see Hathaway happy, no matter what. It’s revealed that her ex-husband (played to subtle, smarmy perfection by Reid Scott) isn’t the best guy, and the whole affair between her and Hayes is an accidental procession of events that ruins her intended ‘summer of self’. The romance she embarks upon is spicy and slightly forbidden, but her Solene seems like a woman much better than the one trapped in a film weirdly in love with a leaden pop singer twenty years her junior. I’ll follow Hathaway most anywhere, but The Idea of You let me down a little. It’s marginal look and narrative is perfect for a streaming service.
The Idea of You begins streaming on Amazon Prime on Thursday May 2nd.
Dallas Film Now. 