Middle-aged women don’t have a lot of fun in movies. If we are depicted onscreen, we are often shown as harried, hypercompetent mothers and wives. We are tragically divorcing or exhaustedly raising our children. Sometimes we do some (alleged) murder. Other times we walk into the sea.
But the horny, stylish romps onscreen are usually reserved for the younger, less encumbered women — women who are more tabula rasa than palimpsest. And I understand. I am a 40-year-old woman in America. It’s hard to have fun in life, much less in a movie. Every woman my age I know is exhausted from managing children, unequal partnerships, aging parents, the erosion of our rights, careers where pay gaps still exist, and there is no girlbossing our way out of them. Over the past decade, we voted. Pantsuitted. Pussy hatted. #MeToo-ed. Shouted our abortions. All to end up here, in 2024, in this Temu-brand 2016 redux. It’s enough to make any woman commit an (alleged) murder or walk into the sea. Or hey, why not both? It’s 2024, women can have it all. But only when it comes to tragic endings.
That’s why The Idea of You is so enticing. In it, Anne Hathaway plays Solène, a 40-year-old mother, business owner, and ex-wife who gets to leave her life and her responsibilities in Silver Lake, California, to run off with a very handsome, and very young, pop star, Hayes Campbell, played by Nicholas Galitzine. Hayes adores Solène, gives her a very expensive watch, and takes her on a private jet. And she is able, for a small amount of time, to do exactly what she wants. And what she wants to do is fuck a 24-year-old and be hot in the South of France.
Honestly, relatable.
The movie is based on the viral book of the same title. Screenwriter Jennifer Westfeldt adapted the story and smoothed out some of its more distracting complications. The young pop star is 24 in the movie, not 20 like in the book. In the book, he cannot legally drink. And the ending of the movie is more rom-com than the book’s portrayal of the very real improbabilities of a 20-year-old boy-man having anything in common with a 40-year-old woman.
But a book has time to allow the reader to weigh the complexities of the relationship. This movie, directed by Michael Showalter, has only an hour and a half to pull us out of our lives and sell us the fantasy.
And it is hard to pull women from the ecosystem of our lives. A straight-to-streaming release (on Prime) means no dark movie-theater isolation. No stripping away of our context. This Hollywood confection is piped into our homes in the midst of the piles of laundry and the teenage daughter texting us about her missing earbuds and the sneaker-strewn floors, and stacks of dishes. I am, per the stereotype, a harried single mother. So I turned on the movie after getting my kids to bed and popping a weed gummy and putting on a face mask — trying to cram self-care and relaxation into the hour or two I have to enjoy myself before crashing asleep.
I wanted to be pulled in. I really tried hard. I had my buzziest of THC, my softest of jammies, my nicest of face masks. But the few moments I was able to fully immerse in the fantasy were a mixture of determination, grit, being stoned, and Hathaway’s acting. Of course the young pop star immediately falls in love with Solène — she’s Anne Hathaway, after all. Galitzine doesn’t have to do much there but look at her and listen. He’s smitten. We are all smitten. But portraying a grown woman smitten with a man without a fully developed frontal lobe takes some acting. And Hathaway is acting.
Their relationship makes the most sense in the moments of literal escape and sensuality — Hayes offers pleasure, joy, giddiness. It’s cringe, it’s a mess, it’s a little irresponsible, it’s all those things adult women are not supposed to be. Those things we all too often surrender to the world like half-drunk water bottles in a TSA checkpoint.
But the fantasy doesn’t last very long before reality pulls Solène back to her context. After an encounter by the pool, where Hayes’ bandmates and the twentysomething women who hang out with them tell her what a fuck boy he is, she goes back to her room, ashamed, and breaks up with him.
Hayes comes to L.A. and finds her. Persuades her to try again. But that, too, falls apart when Izzy, Solène’s daughter, is bullied at school over the relationship. Solène is harassed with tabloid headlines and social media posts calling her gross and a predator. Solène, again, breaks up with Hayes.
Even this highly produced fantasy can barely hold together on the screen before it shatters on the hard ground of the real world. The daughter’s outsized disappointment. The useless ex-husband. The judgment and backlash. This is where it would normally end. And this is where the book does end.
But the movie offers up more fantasy: Five years after their split, Solène is now an empty nester, her obligations to her family less all-consuming. Hayes, who now has a solo career, manly stubble, and a fully functioning frontal lobe, comes back to Solène. We are meant to believe these crazy kids give it another go.
It all feels a little forced. No amount of THC and wishful thinking could convince me that Hayes would come back for Solène. What would they even have in common? What kind of life could they build? My list-addled, practical mom brain could not turn off. Solène just raised one kid, why would she want another?
Because for 40-year-old women there is no escape, there is no romance so all-encompassing, no doe-eyed pop star so pretty, no body so hot, no love big enough that it can erase all the violent, dark, tiresome world around us.
Despite the implausibility of the plot and the incredible odds stacked against the relationship, I willed myself to believe this stupid, impossible fantasy. Maybe I believed it because I wanted to. Or maybe because it was done well onscreen. But it doesn’t really matter, does it? To those worn-out legions streaming this movie in their beds with their buzz-inducing stimulants and face creams, escaping the piles of things to do and clean, it doesn’t matter if the movie is kind of corny or the role of the best friend is underwritten.
And it doesn’t matter if it’s feminist or subversive. (It is neither of those things, but good Christ it doesn’t have to be.) Maybe we are desperate for escape because we have been nailed to the cross of a country that would rather fight war after war than give us reproductive rights. Or because we’ve worked so hard and we deserve it. Or because the pay gap still exists and so does the laundry. And because women, grown women, are human fucking beings, who have sex, who get messy, who want to lose ourselves in a fantasy, who do not have it figured out, who are cringe, who are lost, who are very silly, who are very tired, and who just want to have some fun.
