For those who didn’t think (or believe it possible) that there was such a thing as a “Coachella rom-com,” The Idea of You is here to fill this apparent void. And, although the book of the same name it’s adapted from, written by Robinne Lee and released in 2017, doesn’t involve Coachella, but rather, a concert at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, the same general premise of the “meet-cute” in question is still there. Though, for whatever reason, co-writers Michael Showalter (who also directed) and Jennifer Westfeldt (known for Kissing Jessica Stein and being Jon Hamm’s ex) thought it would be better to make that happen within the context of Coachella, an increasingly vexatious, overpriced music festival that, once upon a time, a woman like Solène Marchand (Anne Hathaway) never would have felt comfortable attending, let alone as a chaperone to her daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin), and her friends, Zeke (Jordan Aaron Hall) and Georgia (Mathilda Gianopoulos). After all, “VIP culture” at the festival wasn’t a thing until at least after Madonna performed in April of 2006 (as many stickers at the time touted, “Madonna Killed Coachella”). Once that shift occurred, for those with the means, “there [was] no real roughing it at Coachella anymore,” as a 2015 L.A. Times article pointed out. And certainly not for a well-to-do, “middle-aged” white woman.
Fortunately, it’s not as though the entire movie takes place within this presently bourgeois context (such an attempt would make for an even worse storyline). It’s only for about twenty minutes that the first act setup centers on Coachella. An act wherein, initially, Solène resigns herself to a lonely weekend of camping (though, in the book, it’s presented as an artist’s retreat in Ojai). Alas, as her ex-husband, Daniel (Reid Scott), is known for doing, he completely ruins her plans (just as he did when he divorced her for a younger woman named Eva [Perry Mattfeld]) by showing up to her house with Izzy and co.—after she already dropped them off at his—and asking if she can drive them there instead now that he’s had an Important Work Thing come up. So, he pleads, why not relish the VIP tickets he shelled out for him and their daughter? Along with the meet-and-greet package he bought for Izzy so that she could interact with boy band August Moon. A band she hasn’t been into since junior high, but such is the out-of-touchness of her father in terms of paying close attention to the ways in which she’s growing up at a rapid pace. As most teenagers do (especially now). Which brings up one of numerous key differences in the book: Izzy/Isabelle actually is still very much an August Moon fangirl. With regard to this detail, it helps that, in the book, she’s twelve…as opposed to being seventeen in the movie. Isabelle’s age in Robinne Lee’s version of the story also raises the stakes much higher in terms of Solène feeling responsible for her child’s emotional well-being. Because by the time kids are in their late teens, that ship has sailed.
Indeed, one of the many heavy-handed expositions that Showalter and Westfeldt emphasize in their screenplay adaptation is how much more involved and caring Solène is as a parent than Daniel. Even though she, too, has her own successful career to juggle: running a gallery in Silverlake. A noticeable neighborhood shift from the book’s setting of Culver City. But Silverlake is just so much “hipper” for the purposes of the camera…even if the majority of shooting took place in Georgia (namely, Atlanta and Savannah). This is perhaps a more overt way in which The Idea of You as a film reveals just how much it skimps on things. Including making an actual statement about the way older women are treated when they date younger men in comparison to the inverse of that: older men with younger women. Sure, there are some errant, overwrought lines delivered—like Izzy telling Solène, “The people on the internet that are picking you apart are disgusting. It’s ‘cause you’re a woman and it’s ‘cause you’re older than him [thanks for spelling it out]”—but, by and large, the message about double standards gets lost in this becoming a movie about catering to a forty-something female fantasy. The idea, not of “you,” but of still being appealing to much younger man.
Among the generation about to enter Anne Hathaway’s age bracket, this is more of a concern than it ever was in the past (likely as a result of fewer women settling for “fading into the background” once they’ve reached “a certain age”). And also, perhaps, more of a moot point. Mainly because, if you have the money, it’s never been easier to appear younger than you truly are, with Samantha Jones’ prophecy of “mani/pedi/Botox” being totally normalized at this point. Then there is the recent “joke” (read: accurate assessment) about how millennials are looking younger than run-ragged, “overstressed” (a.k.a. overstimulated, visually) Gen Z. With millennials actually favoring a younger-looking style (see: Lana Del Rey’s coquette aesthetic or Paris Hilton’s puerile butterfly wings) as Gen Z actively ages their skin with hyper-use of glycolic acid-packed skin products that will sooner (rather than later) have the reverse effect on their complexion that these face washes and exfoliants are meant to have on non-teen skin.
Solène, being born to French parents (though grandparents in the movie), clearly has to worry less about skin issues with such heritage. And it’s obviously benefited her in terms of coming across as Izzy’s “big sister” rather than her mother. That, and she had her daughter at a relatively young age (a much younger one in the movie)…sort of like Lorelei Gilmore.
Allowing herself to be swept away by Hayes’ British charm and wit (a decided false stereotype when it comes to British men), things escalate quite quickly, even though, in the current era, audiences might be hard-pressed to believe that a white boy band would have this much cachet. Because, if we’re being honest, the moment for white boy bands passed a while ago—at the latest, with One Direction (though, in truth, the heyday ended after Backstreet Boys and NSYNC). Even so, readers and viewers alike are meant to suspend their disbelief in terms of surrendering to the idea that it wouldn’t be a more BTS-inspired boy band that Izzy was obsessed with. Perhaps, undercuttingly, it speaks to a certain kind of racism in not wanting a white woman (or girl) to go for an Asian man. That would add an additional layer of “complexity” to the age gap element that audiences might just not be ready for.
The book itself does a better job of giving more dimension to the boy band, at least bestowing the fandom with a name…as all fandoms are now required to have in real life. In this case: “Augies.” Or “Augie Moms.” Solène doesn’t see herself that way at all, though fears she’ll be automatically pegged as one just because she got roped into the meet-and-greet. And yet, in the book, being able to observe Izzy’s excitement is both delightful and bittersweet, the latter sentiment addressed when she notes, “…it pained me to realize that Isabelle was now part of this tribe. This motley crew searching for happiness in five boys from Britain whom they did not know, could never know and who would never return the adulation.” That last part speaking to the intensity of parasocial relationships that has amplified in the twenty-first century with social media.
In the years when Solène would have been a teenager, the magnitude of that parasocial dynamic didn’t seem as strong. Not when it was all about posters on the wall as opposed to 24/7 internet stalking. To that end, there’s a moment in the book where Solène mentions having attended New Kids on the Block’s Magic Summer Tour (which went on from 1990 to 1992) and how, even then, she couldn’t fully let herself give in to the “thrall” that boy bands cause among tweens and teens.
Maybe that’s why she can’t resist giving way to it in the present, agreeing to go to lunch with Hayes in the book after he does a less stalker-y move by calling her gallery instead of just showing up like he does in the movie. As a matter of fact, the stalking aspect so often normalized in more “retro” rom-coms (e.g., Say Anything, 10 Things I Hate About You, Love Actually, etc.) is alive and well in The Idea of You, with audiences apparently expected to ignore it because of how “hot” and “charismatic” Hayes is. Besides, he’s a “star.” He’s used to simply going after what he wants and getting it. Applying that same ambition to a decidedly averse Solène. Averse not because she doesn’t want to tap that, but because she’s older, more pragmatic and should “know better.” She’s not driven by the same carnal lust as someone as hormone-driven as Hayes, who is twenty-four in the movie, but twenty in the book (maybe the writers thought those extra four years added onto his life would make it less scandalous). In both versions of The Idea of You, Solène is about to be forty. It’s mentioned so many times (complete with a birthday cake that reads: “Lordy Lordy Look Who’s 40”), it would be hard to forget.
And yet, as The Idea of You would have people believe, it seems that one needs to be a forty-year-old American woman in order to be on the same intellectual level as a twenty-four-year-old British man. Accordingly, the repartee between Hayes and Solène is meant to be the foreplay neither can resist consummating. At the lunch they have in the book, Solène ribs, “Something in the water in Notting Hill?” It’s a lunch during which they actually go out to eat as opposed to Solène taking Hayes back to her house. The mention of this London neighborhood brings up the automatic thought of 1999’s Notting Hill, amongst the few other movies in the rom-com genre to explore a romance through a lens in which one of the people in the relationship is world-famous (unfortunately, Marry Me tried to rip off this concept with much less success). Specifically, an actress named Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) who ends up in her own unlikely tryst with a “normal” named William Thacker (Hugh Grant).
Another rarity in the genre, 2007’s Music and Lyrics, has Grant playing the famous—or erstwhile famous—one: Alex Fletcher, a former member of 80s boy band Pop! (an amalgam of Wham! and Duran Duran). He eventually falls for “normal” Sophie Fisher (Drew Barrymore), the woman tasked with watering his plants who he suddenly discovers is a brilliant lyricist. It might say something that there’s always a Brit involved in these types of relationships. Or that Hugh Grant is in both films in roles reversed. And yes, like Hayes, Alex is terrified that he’s just a joke, and that no one will ever see him as being capable of writing music that is anything beyond froth. Both Solène and Sophie assure each of their respective men that it isn’t true. Though neither man seems as keen to reciprocate much in the way of similar support.
For Solène, that’s particularly important, what with the ramped-up scrutiny she gets as a result of being much older than Hayes (though their age difference is pretty standard between many older men and younger women). Regardless, it’s evident that, despite all the obstacles—even when it comes to her daughter being mocked and harassed, too—Solène and Hayes will end up together. That’s the point of movies like this: to be reassured that, against all odds (even the highly specific odds stacked against an older, non-famous woman dating a young, very famous man), love will triumph. It’s what the likes of OG star-falls-for-normal movie Notting Hill taught us long ago. And yes, there are two ostensible nods to that movie in terms of the mise-en-scène that harkens back to Anna coming into the bookshop and delivering her famous line: “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.” The first is when Solène goes to the studio where Hayes is recording a song (inspired by her, duh) and asks if he’ll give her another chance, and the second is a the very end, when Hayes comes into her gallery after they agree to take a five-year break and see if they’re still “hooked” on each other once all the scrutiny has died down and Izzy has gotten old enough to not be in school anymore. Needles to say, they are.
Along the way to this inevitable moment, however, the rockiness of their obstacle-laden romance doesn’t come across as all that high-stakes the way it does in the book. Even so, while the movie might not top Notting Hill or Music and Lyrics (though, for some bizarre reason, the latter has a lower approval rating than this Hathaway movie), The Idea of You can at least take comfort in being a notch above Marry Me.
