The Idea of You review – Anne Hathaway lives out fanfic fantasy in solid romance
There are lithe, low-level pleasures to be had in the glossy pop romance The Idea of You, Amazon’s latest attempt to turn a fanfic fave into a broadly alluring date movie. It follows last year’s Red, White and Royal Blue, a smartphone screen adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s what-if gay romp. In that film, it was the fantasy of a president’s son and an English prince. Here it’s a 40-year-old mum and a Harry Styles-level pop star, a blogpost daydream of love and lust, played out with both jostling for space.
It’s a far sleeker and far more satisfying package than the former, illuminated by the genuine movie star power of Anne Hathaway and made with a higher level of craft, from the sturdy studio-level direction of Michael Showalter to a mostly smooth-going script. The romcom genre has allegedly been “back” for a while now but that’s mostly translated to quantity over quality and while last year’s sleeper smash Anyone But You might have looked the part, it was cursed with junky dialogue, hapless plotting and a disastrously illfitting leading lady. With Hathaway at its centre, The Idea of You is on far surer footing, in small moments almost threatening to be something far greater but settling into being perfectly acceptable instead, a plane movie par excellence.
Actor-turned-novelist Lee was inspired to write the book while crushing on a YouTube video of a boyband, imagining what her life would be like if she ended up running away with him on tour (Styles fans later claimed it as their own although Lee denies he was the primary target). Solène (Hathaway) is turning 40 and while she runs a successful gallery in Los Angeles, she’s still bruised from her ex-husband’s cruel infidelity and the inevitable divorce that followed.
When Solène’s ex lets her and teenage daughter Izzy (Ella Rubin) down yet again, she is forced to step in and exchange her solo hiking trip for a weekend of babysitting at Coachella. While there she meets Hayes (Nicholas Galitzine), the baby-faced lead singer of headlining band August Moon. An instant connection turns into an unlikely romance as Solène gives in to the whirlwind.
It’s easy to see why the source material caught fire with readers, a similar combo of lux fairytale romance and masturbatory wish fulfilment to Fifty Shades (Lee admits she got advice from EL James). It’s not as kinky and the film, according to diehards, is not quite as explicit as the book, but it’s a romcom with an awareness of how important sex can be and how the intricacies of how we interact sexually can help to define a relationship. The age gap has been somewhat smoothed from the book with Hayes now being 24 rather than 20 but it’s still a central cause of concern and conflict in the story, Solène made hyper-aware of how she’s viewed by those around him and, eventually, the greater public.
Hathaway’s pristine glamour is such that it leads us not to wonder why a 24-year-old could-have-anyone heartthrob would be so very taken by an unfamous woman old enough to be his mother and more to wonder what 24-year-old wouldn’t. The film briefly touches upon issues of misogyny and ageism but only very lightly, Solène’s life based in almost as much fantasy as that of Hayes (her house is as idyllic as the hotel rooms she’s whisked away to). The script, from Showalter and Jennifer
Westfeldt, might be written with more thought than one has come to expect from a streaming romcom – the low bar has meant that dialogue that just about makes sense is cause for applause – but enough so that one then starts to expect just a little bit more texture. Solène and Hayes are both a little too dreamily constructed to ever feel like real people and there’s such little interest in any other character in the film that, like an actual dream, it can be a little too tightly focused.
There’s probably a trick being missed with this one, cinemas being skipped for a headfirst dive into streaming instead. Working with what appears to be a relatively sizable budget for the genre, treating us to multiple locations, Showalter manages to make The Idea of You look and breathe like the grander films it comes after rather then the tinnier ones it sits alongside. Hathaway, returning to the kind of warm comfort food viewing many still know and love her for, is a compelling lead of considerable, rarely matched charm, adding more heart and soul to a film that often sorely needs it. And with Galitzine, a more believable pop star than he was a prince in Red, White and Royal Blue, there is enough electricity to power us through some otherwise underpowered patches (it helps too that the film’s fake music is strong enough to make us believe it). It’s all not ultimately enough to truly transport us back to the genre’s heyday but it’s a damn sight better than what we’ve been forced to get used to.
The Idea of You is now available on Amazon Prime
hard to believe that Paul Auster, who seemed forever young, has just entered the pantheon of American letters, and so memorably on May Day. To me, he has always been a mix of Puck and Ishmael, at once playful and fateful, but never less than a tangible voice and presence, even when offstage. Somehow, it’s as if a writer, who always shaped his story as he wanted, has lost control of the narrative-line.
I first met him when his New York Trilogy had just been published in the UK.Auster was a romantic figure married to another notable contemporary, the writer Siri Hustvedt, his beloved and ethereal muse, both equally blessed with a gift for friendship. This was the 1980s, an age of irrational exuberance. With their daughter Sophie banging her spoon in her high chair, this family seemed like the privileged inhabitants of a brave new world.
New York and its suburbs was Auster’s turf, immortalised not just in his fiction but also in movies like Smoke and Lulu on the Bridge. His conversation, inflected with the accents of the street, and refracted through the academy, flowed like the thrilling dialogue of a novel-inprogress.
In person, and on the page, Paul was a natural raconteur. Few writers I’ve ever known could command his appearance with such a spell-binding grasp of an audience. Even fewer possessed his mastery of voice and story, a universal gift: in America, he was an uber-cool easterner; in France, half French; in Britain, the face of a certain avant garde.
If that seemed effortless and natural, and all of a piece with his persona, it also concealed Auster’s lifelong dedication to the art of prose fiction. I know, indeed, that he continued to write throughout the final days of his tragic endgame. As an artist, his circle encompassed many great performers and auteurs of stature, including magicians and poets. As a writer, his models, whom he spoke and wrote about as friends, included Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Crane and Samuel Beckett, the enigma he’d known in 1960s Paris. This was his preferred society. On our last outing together, we went on a pub crawl through places some of his favourite writers had spent time: Gough Square (Dr Johnson), and Bunhill Fields (William Blake), and Poet’s Corner (Alexander Pope).
Every folio of his next manuscript was a kind of homage to these mentors. Like all great writers, he never ceased, in Auden’s numinous words, “communing with the dead”.
I can hardly believe that he is now in their company. America and the world has lost a passionate, gentle, wise, and noble soul, a literary voice for the ages.
***
Colum McCann: ‘He was quite extraordinary’
Irish novelistOn 19 August 2022, Paul Auster gathered with a dozen other writers for a PEN event in support of Salman Rushdie, who had been viciously stabbed a week earlier. Paul stood on the steps in his customary black, his grey hair swept back, and read, with great verve, Rushdie’s words about the importance of novel-making in the poisoned narrowness of our times.
One of the things that Paul always stood for was the ability to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about the world within, in order to also acknowledge the wider world around us. We must understand the lives beyond our own. Open the curtains. Unlock the coordinates. This happens, Paul suggested, within the labyrinthian nature of storytelling.
I recall reading his early novellas – it felt like he was splitting open the atom. A street in Brooklyn swept itself out to the rest of the world.
And Paul himself was quite extraordinary. His laugh wasn’t just explosive, it was embracing. Those dark eyes were often described as hooded, and indeed they were, but they also worked as umbrellas. Come in under here. Stand a moment with me. Let’s watch the rain and maybe even make sense of it.
One of the things I will recall the most was his sense of solidarity on that day of the PEN event, just two years ago, when he stood up for Salman and said to the man who lay beyond in a hospital bed: “I love you as a brother and treasure the friendship we have built together for the past 30 years.” Earlier that morning Paul was in a room in the library getting ready for the readings alongside his wife Siri. We were chatting about the terrible events, and Paul turned slightly, caught us with those eyes and said: “But you kill off the closed mind with the open one.”
One of the beauties of literature is that it remains with us even beyond death, and the thing we can celebrate is that we will have Paul’s words still speaking to us down through those years yet to come.
***
Benjamin Markovits: ‘He conveyed the intensity of ordinary life’
British-American novelistI first read the New York Trilogy while staying at a downtown hotel in São Paulo by the side of a dingy rooftop swimming pool. It was summer and hot and very bright among all the skyscrapers but you also had a sense, somewhere a long and noisy way below, of life operating at a totally different scale. Book and cityscape seemed to match, Auster’s lucid, simple prose and the very unsteady narrative ground underlying it. He was famous of course for his metafictional detective games, but what stuck with me wasn’t the meta part, but the fact that those games allowed him to convey the intensity of ordinary life, especially ordinary loneliness. Like detectives, we live by our almost obsessive attention to details, bathroom trips, worries about money, who said what to whom.
His latest novel, now his last, Baumgartner, is about a widower who tries to reconstruct a meaningful life for himself after his wife’s death: “For the first six months he lived in a state of such profound confusion that there were times when he would wake up in the morning and forget that Anna was dead.” But that confusion is also a source of comfort if not of hope. It is a moving bookend to a brilliant career.
***
Sinéad Gleeson: ‘He played with ideas of coincidence and doubling’
Irish author and artistIn the autumn of 2013, I was presenting a Book Show for RTÉ radio and my producer and I went to New York, armed with a dizzying schedule of people to record. Our last interview of the first day, as jetlag started to kick in, was Paul Auster. We had been invited to the Brooklyn brownstone he shared with his wife, Siri Hustvedt. Over the course of a couple of hours, we wandered around, marvelling at their book collection, meticulously organised by theme (“That’s contemporary American fiction right there”) and the art on the walls: two Gerhard Richter pieces that were gifted to Hustvedt after she wrote essays about the artist’s work, and a piece made by a neighbour, the writer Jonathan Safran Foer, which seemed to consist largely of an antique optometrist’s kit. The inside of Auster’s house reflected the themes in his work – writing, art and ways of seeing. He believed in and played with ideas of coincidence, doubling and doppelgangers. Echoes and double exposure populate his narratives.
Although a New Jersey native, New York, its psychology and geography are indelibly stamped on his novels and screenplays. In the interview he spoke about making a pilgrimage to Dublin as a young man to follow in the footsteps of James Joyce. He spoke frankly about his writing process and showed us his beloved Olympia typewriter. Its worn keys looked suspended, as if constantly awaiting the return of his hands. That evening, we also met and interviewed Hustvedt, who I’m thinking of today with this great loss. Auster spoke of her with such love and admiration: “She’s probably the smartest person I’ve ever known and she’s essentially my only reader … it’s been a blessing”.
***
James Meek: ‘He was a kind and generous writer’
British novelist and journalistThe New York Trilogy is one of those thrilling, frightening works that connects us, however briefly, to a space just beyond our own, and Paul will, rightly, be forever celebrated for it. But I would also like to record what a kind and generous writer he was in person. I met Paul and Siri at the Icelandic literary festival 20 years ago, and they couldn’t have been warmer or more friendly. Paul, among a daunting roster of celebrities, vied with Margaret Atwood as the biggest name: when he read from his work at the main theatre in Reykjavik, people were crowded around the entrance, unable to get in, but trying to hear him. His reading voice was deep, hypnotic, otherworldly.
We met again over the years, but it was that week in Iceland that left the deepest impression: his incredible stamina, bringing a furious competitive energy to a writers’ football match after a long night on the wine, the freshness he brought, in an interview, to the famous story of how City of Glass came to be written – a story he must have told a thousand times – his tolerance of other people’s personal crises, including mine, and his unaffected warmth towards writers as a class, especially the younger ones coming through. He told us about a French literary initiative he’d taken part in: dozens of famous writers from all over the world were asked to nominate a young writer they admired, with the idea that the established name and the newcomer would take part in an event. After he’d made his choice, the organisers came back to him to say he was the only writer on the list who’d been able to come up with a young writer they admired. One of the people they’d asked had said: “There are no young writers.” Paul had a look of real indignation, and surprise, on his face. No
for him.