The Idea of You is a rom-com that follows a 40-year-old woman who begins a relationship with a 24-year-old pop star after meeting at Coachella. Starring Anne Hathaway as Solene and Nicholas Galitzine as Hayes, The Idea of You is better than your run-of-the-mill rom-coms but leaves a lot to be desired.
I am not the biggest rom-com fan anymore. They’ve entered the action movie tier for me where they need to really stand out if they want my attention. Either flip the script and subvert my expectations or have two leads with insanely good chemistry. The Idea of You doesn’t really do either. Anne Hathaway is a great actress and I’ve become a big Nicholas Galitzine fan recently, but their romance feels incredibly superficial. There’s nothing notable that binds them outside of their attractiveness.
The conflict is somehow very realistic yet very forced. It is a relationship between a 40-year-old and a 24-year-old old, I’m sure you can guess why halfway through the movie, they split up. With no real reason, they end up back together within 10 minutes. Rom-coms always have that ticking bomb of a conflict that has to drive our leads apart and it gets boring when you know it’s coming, and they don’t even bother to think of something more interesting.
What I did like was how they addressed the subject matter. We see it in our real life, no one bats an eye when an older man dates a young woman. Leonardo DiCaprio famously dates women up until they are 25 before looking to start new with someone else and we treat it as a joke. Yet when a woman is much older than her boyfriend/husband, we as a society scrutinize them.
The movie portrays the backlash that Solene receives felt uncomfortably real. When the paparazzi leak their photos, they are met with a myriad of hate comments calling her a “whore” and how they feel bad for her daughter. It is cruel and the movie makes a point of hypocrisy. Solene’s husband cheated on her and abandoned her for a younger woman yet when she enters a consensual relationship with a younger man, he becomes furious and aggressive towards her. The movie doesn’t get preachy, which I hope makes the point resonate with more people.
I will also say, the movie is cute. Again, I like both Hatheway and Galitzine a lot and they do a good job of keeping me engaged. The music Haye’s band August Moon makes is very catchy and I was very impressed going down the rabbit hole of watching Galitzine sing on YouTube.
To wrap this up, I wish the ending came 10 minutes sooner. Similar to The Greatest Hits which came out this year, the movie fades to black with around 10 minutes to spare after our lead comes to their emotional conclusion. Instead of ending there and letting us decide how the movie ends, The Idea of You picks up 5 years later (when you watch the movie you’ll get why) and we have a new ending that is more definitive. In my opinion, movies that have ambiguous endings last so much longer in my head because I’ll think about what could’ve happened. With a title like this one, you’d expect the themes of fantasizing about a person and the reality of them settling in would be more prevalent, but it really misses that mark in my eyes.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The Idea of You is a movie I’ve found that I like a bit less now after typing out my thoughts. It has cute moments anchored by two very talented leads, but I feel like this movie is not one I’ll ever really think about again. It doesn’t have any lasting emotions, which is fine, but it was not what I like in a movie. It can be a decent popcorn flick if that’s what you’re into.
