This past week was South by Southwest. The closing night film was 'The Idea of You' starring Ann Hathaway, and I was able to bring my wife out to see this one, so let's talk about it.
Hi, my name is Sean, and I love to talk about movies and TV way too much. With that in mind, go ahead and join me down below in the comments section. Share your excitement level for 'The Idea of You'. Have you read the book? All of that fun stuff! And if you're in the future and you've seen it, what did you think about it?
Now, I went into this one knowing nothing about it, but the one-sentence synopsis about a 40-year-old woman starting to date the most popular pop singer in the entire world—that's all I knew, and that it was based off of a book. This was the world premiere for the film, which was very cool because it meant the director and Hathaway, the full cast, in attendance, and we were actually in the front row, which is normally a very bad thing unless they do a Q&A with the entire cast, including Anne Hathaway who was just a matter of feet right in front of us, which was very cool.
So glad I was able to bring my wife out to check this one out because it was a movie she was excited about and a movie that I thought would probably having her perspective would be helpful in reviewing the film. But was the movie any good? Let's talk about it.
And when it comes to movies like this, I usually rate them initially on the date night scale, how good of a date night did the movie provide? And in the case of this movie, it was a great date night. I thought the movie was very good, and my wife absolutely loved it.
'The Idea of You'—it's romantic, it's steamy, it's funny, and it's very humid. It's from director Michael Show Walter who about seven years back directed 'The Big Sick,' which, very different plot lines, very different tones, but kind of in the same romantic dramedy category where they're very strong on the romance, they also have a lot of drama in them, and they're consistently funny, but they're just labeling them a ROM com gives people the wrong expectation because when you normally think of romcoms, you're thinking of kind of these outrageous setups, big broad humor like I think of a movie like 'Anyone but You' from just a few years, a few months back that I thought was a very enjoyable ROM com. But it's all of these kind of very contrived, ridiculous scenarios that put a big gigantic grin on your face. And what 'The Idea of You' and then a few years back 'The Big Sick' did, what this director seems to like to do with these types of movies, is take a fantastic set up. In the case of this movie, a 40-year-old woman who has a 24-year-old pop singer start dating her, that's a very fantastical situation, it's very much a fantasy, but from there it anchors in reality. So the characters, the emotions, the conflicts they feel based on real human emotions, actual insecurities, that's where it all comes from rather than just big outlandish situations in ridiculousness, and that just kind of gives up humanity to everything. It adds an emotion to everything taking place because it's not just far-fetched, you can relate to things even though it is the scenario that none of us are ever going to experience anything remotely similar to anything in this movie, so it's got to walk through each of those pieces.
First off, it's very romantic, it is very much about this relationship between these two very unlikely people, and it does a good job of actually slowly building that tension. You can tell there's a spark there from the first time they see each other. And at the same time, because it's trying to anchor itself in reality, you have this woman, this mother who's tried to do the responsible thing, and so it's just this constant, like the right kind of push and pull of trying to not give into something that probably unwise, probably has a lot of complications that would come with it, and so you feel that romance, you feel the chemistry between the two people, you buy into the fact that this very ridiculous scenario makes sense. Where very early on, they kind of establish what it is about this 40-year-old woman that this very famous person would be attracted to, like besides that she looks like Anne Hathaway, but like what about the way she treats him, add something else there. Likewise, what is the position this woman is in life that should be drawn to this very outlandish scenario that has many complications with it? And so you feel that romance, you buy into them, and you understand all the complications, all the reasons this is a bad idea, but you're still rooting for something very tricky.
Also, like I said, it gets steamy, it's not like raunchy, it's not explicit, but it also is like you're not naked people running around, it's not that version of steamy, but when they start kissing, when the love affair begins, like they really go for it, and it's interesting like to as someone that sees 100 movies in the theater every single year and watches hundreds of movies every year, something pops out when it's like a certain type of sequence that you feel like you haven't seen in a theater with a group of people in a long time. So I was watching this at a packed 1200 seat arena, our theater as you know these people start to passionately kiss each other and hands start roaming around, and you start to realize like there's there's not as many scenes like that in movies as there used to be, and in this context where you buy into their relationship and the build up, and then these moments are the payoff, like feels like this very steamy film without needing to get particularly explicit with what it's going for.
Also, it can be very funny, but not in a big setup kind of way. It's all much more subtle humor, more organic humor growing from these people and this awkward relationship of sorts and the little moments that come from it. The guy that lives this life of luxury and fame kind of by himself, so alone in a crowd, and then this woman who's in a family but has her own setback, frustrations, and everything, there's just all of these very natural ways that their two lives create little pieces of humor that come along with that. And like I said at the beginning, it's very human, and I think Anne Hathaway during the Q&A afterwards put this really nicely where she said normally when we make coming-of-age stories, they're about people in their youth, but we're all still coming of age. We're all still figuring ourselves out, no matter how much success we have or how old we are. And in the case of this movie, you have a pop singer at the top of the world, all the fame and popularity you could ever ask for, but he's still trying to figure out himself, and he's trying to find people that accept him for him, not the idea of him. And then you have this 40-year-old woman who has a daughter but she's realizing she never really got to live her life and figure out who she was, and so she described it as this coming-of-age story of her trying to figure out what that looks like, what does pursuing love look like at her age even in this very fantastical scenario, and because of that, this totally fantasy romance and in so many ways, it's kind of a classic princess story, it's kind of that same story as Twilight where you have this woman that feels unnoticed, that feels rejected feels so ordinary, and then is spotted by the person on the top of the world that's in on paper way out of her league spots her and thinks that she's special and she's the one that he wants to pursue, be his princess, his pop star, his vampire, whatever it is, that's the same fantasy that's in this movie, but here it actually feels earned, as fantastical as it is, you're looking at it being like I believe this, this relationship right here. Once again, it does help that this ordinary woman happens to look like a movie star, and it's that humanity that I think is gonna elevate this film for a lot of people, and I imagine it's the reason that the book became so popular. I have not read it, I'm not a part of that subculture at all, but I would imagine that's exactly what people connected to that made it into a film that Anne Hathaway would want to star in.
And you know I took my wife to go see it, and you know she just in general enjoys movies like this, but it was all those little extra elements about finding yourself that made her really connect with it and very much resonate with her. My wife turned 40 back in January, the plot of the movie involves a woman who turned 40 during the run time of the film, and there's all these ideas that she kind of are processing through different phases of life and this one just touches on one that many people face as you're growing up as a grown-up, so I thought it was very well done, um it was a film that I enjoyed in and of itself but more importantly, my wife really enjoyed the film, it was a lot of fun. I can't wait to see it again but a couple more things to talk about so let's move on to the back, and the big thing that comes to mind here is that at a certain point in time, it comes very repetitious with the way they handle their relationship. It's this really rubber band relationship where clearly Anne Hathaway's drawn to him, actually likes him, but there's a lot of reasons why this is a complicated idea or a very bad idea, and so she keeps being like no no no no no okay okay okay okay no no no no no okay okay okay okay all throughout the run time of the film, and in particular when you kind of get into like the back 40% of the movie the way that that's kind of paced out the timing of how it plays out just felt very much like we just keep having to do this back and forth thing and maybe in the book its elaborated a little bit more or perhaps the passage of time plays out differently but the way certain choices are made what they mean and how quickly perhaps they're undone in the back half of the film I just thought was I don't know there's some wrinkles there that could have been ironed out to make it not so repetitious or not feel like we're undoing things so quickly kind of in the same ballpark. It is in many ways following the template of romcoms of two unlikely people get together, things are great some complication happens and it follows some of that maybe it follows it it runs through the cycle too many times as per my previous point in this but you know there's certain ways where you can start to guess where the complications are coming because we've seen ROM coms before.
Overall I thought this was a very good romantic dramedy that made for a great date night, it had relatable characters that you connected with the story on a very human emotional level while being entertained by it. I got everything that I wanted out of this world. Overall it's an A on the entertainment scale and 8.5 out of 10 and definitely see it. It will be on Amazon Prime in May—too bad they're not releasing this one in theaters. It feels like romcoms are making a little bit of a comeback, there's quite a few solid good ones coming out recently down below in the pinned comment is my other South by Southwest coverage,