It’s no secret that the rom-com is an ever-dying genre. One that’s harder and harder to “spoon-feed” audiences that have gotten both younger and more jaded. The last generation to truly “revere” (or at least appreciate) the art of the rom-com (and it is far more of an art than people give it credit for) is probably millennials. Sydney Sweeney, however, is not quite a millennial, having missed the cutoff by just a year. But perhaps as a “geriatric Gen Zer,” she identifies more with the millennial heart, hence her commitment to the role of Beatrice a.k.a. “Bea” (a name that no one who is twenty-six years old would ever have, but 1) it’s a nod to Much Ado About Nothing and 2) that’s the least of one’s suspension-of-disbelief worries). A character given life by co-screenwriters Ilana Wolpert and Will Gluck (who hasn’t written a rom-com since 2011’s Friends With Benefits (itself a foil to No Strings Attached, released earlier the same year; and weirdly, Justin Timberlake probably should have starred in that film instead since NSYNC titled their 2000 album the same thing). And since Anyone But You is earnest about “bringing back the rom-com,” Bea is someone who wastes no time walking right into a meet-cute.
While more conventional rom-coms might wait a few scenes instead of just “raw dogging” their audience like that with a meet-cute, Anyone But You takes the plunge for a “good” reason: Bea and the object of her affection, Ben (Glen Powell), are about to hate each other far more than they ever like each other for the brief twelve or so hours they spend on a date. This after Ben does her a solid by pretending she’s his wife so she can jump the line at the coffee shop to be able to buy something, therefore use the bathroom. Then, of course, further hijinks ensue because the sink ends up spraying her entire crotch with water so she has to air dry her jeans by taking them off. Miraculously (and because of rom-com “law”), the jeans are able to fully dry so that she can exit the bathroom without seeming like “the girl who pissed her pants” to Ben.
Like many beloved and, at times, “awesomely bad” rom-coms (most of them falling into the subcategory of “teen movie”) of the last few decades (including Just One of the Guys, 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s the Man and Warm Bodies), Anyone But You borrows the core of its plotline from William Shakespeare. Specifically, Much Ado About Nothing. And yet, like 10 Things I Hate About You, the film opts to “pepper in” multiple “little” Easter eggs pertaining to the British bard. For example, after Bea walks out of Ben’s apartment in the morning, there’s a wall she passes that features the manicured graffiti: “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.” (Maybe that’s believable enough in an “erudite” town like Boston.) This being extracted from a monologue by Romeo in The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet during which he continues on with a barrage of oxymorons: “Why, then,/O brawling love!/O loving hate!/O any thing, of nothing first create!/O heavy lightness! serious vanity!/Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!/Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!/Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!/This love feel I, that feel no love in this./Dost thou not laugh?” Gluck and Wolpert’s allusion to this monologue from Romeo is an intentional nod to the adage, “There’s a fine line between love and hate” (or “thin line,” depending on who you ask).
Obviously, this applies very much to the dynamic between Bea and Ben, who vacillate between the two so-called extremes at any given moment throughout the movie. As far as being anything like a “direct” adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, the crux of what Anyone But You borrows is the idea that various people, particularly one couple, are trying to convince Bea and Ben that each one is in love with the other.
This is done by Bea’s sister, Halle (Hadley Robertson), and Ben’s good friend, Claudia (Alexandra Shipp), the ones getting married and choosing to have a destination wedding in Sydney when they do. As for the seemingly “random” location choice on Gluck’s part, he explained to The Hollywood Reporter that it was a mere matter of funneling his love for the city into something. So it was that he stated, “I wanted Anyone But You set specifically in Sydney because I had really fallen in love with the city, starting back in 2018. After making Peter Rabbit in Sydney, I liked it so much that for Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway, I moved my whole family down there.” He also added, “Almost every time you shoot a movie in Sydney, you have to pretend it’s somewhere else and frame out the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. For Anyone But You, I thought, ‘Why do that?’ We actually wrote this movie one hundred percent for Sydney—very specific to the destination.” The person, maybe not so much. For Sydney Sweeney’s character could easily be played by just about any current Hollywood ingenue (of which there are surprisingly few compared to the days of 00s-era Hollywood). Except maybe Maude Apatow (a.k.a. Sweeney’s “TV sister”). In any case, Anyone But You does build on a rather lacking selection of mainstream movies set in Sydney (most of them “full-on Australian” fare like Strictly Ballroom or Muriel’s Wedding). Alluring viewers to take a trip there as much as it allures them to play “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield (Gluck clearly has a thing for Bedingfield’s music if we’re also going by Easy A).
As for Halle and Claudia, like Bea and Ben, their names are also a callback to Much Ado About Nothing’s Claudio and Hero. The couple theoretically “at the center of it all.” Instead, though, everyone gets into the spirit of trying to manipulate Bea and Ben into falling in love. Or at least falling in like for a couple of days (though the movie, at times, feels as though it takes place over a week). Largely out of convenience and wanting to get through said wedding weekend without hearing any more of their bickering. Which is, per rom-com rules, merely just “Hepburn-Tracy”-esque “repartee” that ultimately acts as a kind of foreplay. Indeed, not giving in immediately to the temptation to fuck the “hate” away is half the fun/appeal for Bea and Ben.
In terms of dialogue related to that repartee, as well as the plotline itself, Anyone But You might not have the most stalwart of scripts (despite being “adapted” from the unbesmirched Shakespeare). Nor is it anywhere in the same league as rom-com classic standards like His Girl Friday or Some Like It Hot (and later, movies like Pretty Woman, Clueless [which favors a Jane Austen riff rather than a Shakespeare one], The Wedding Singer and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. But what it lacks in substance and “pedigree,” it makes up for in postcard-from-Sydney (Australia and Sweeney) appeal and, well, the sheer fact that it’s a rom-com at all. Because, apart from No Hard Feelings, there hasn’t been much in the way of recent rom-com fare for Anyone But You to compete with. In fact, people just seem grateful to bear witness to the existence of a new rom-com at all, what with their increasing unicorn status. It doesn’t have to be anything as “highfalutin” as Shakespeare either. Which Anyone But You certainly isn’t—though it does what it can to “pay tribute.” Mainly through “carefully-curated” lines inserted arbitrarily into the mouths of select characters (e.g., “Some cupids kill with arrows and some with traps”) or on signage where you least expect it (e.g., “Assume thy part in some disguise”).
One supposes that’s the height of “sophistication” these days when it comes to a Shakespeare “remake” (though “Shakespeare hodgepodge” seems like the more appropriate phrase—an amalgam of “little references” and “collage-like interpretations” of Shakespeare’s work). Throw in a cute koala and a song that can help a clip go viral on TikTok and, voilà, suddenly you have a hit rom-com on your hands. The song, mind you, is the aforementioned “Unwritten.” Not, say, Olivia Rodrigo’s “bad idea right?,” which soundtracks the trailer (perpetuating a “Rodrigo trend” in trailers if also having “get him back!” played during the Mean Girls 2024 trailer is an indication…but hey, Wolpert did previously work on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, so perhaps her Olivia love goes way back).
Indeed, it’s been said that some people are only going to the movie to make it to the credits scene where “Unwritten” plays in all its…glory? (that can’t be the right word). Then they can film themselves with the outtakes (complete with a koala whose stoic facial expression is translated to: “Please leave me alone”). And here one thought that seeing Dermot Mulroney and Rachel Griffiths (both of whom appeared in rom-com staple My Best Friend’s Wedding) act as Bea’s parents would be enough. But alas, no one seems to remember such “little details” about rom-coms of yore. Which is how rom-coms like Anyone But You might continue to prevail if the studio system agrees to keep making and distributing them in movie theaters instead of just via online platforms. In which case, there’s going to be a need for more “destination movies” to compete with the success of this one. Which has firmly marked its territory, for better or worse, on Sydney (Australia and Sweeney).
Genna Rivieccio
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