"The Idea of You" Imagines an Almost Ideal Love

A much-needed refresh to the staid older woman-younger man romance trope. It's not a home run, but it's progress.

Hollywood has a hard time with a functional, healthy romance between an older woman and a younger man onscreen. Such films are either salacious (Notes on a Scandal), asexual (Harold & Maude), tragic (The Good Girl), funny and sad (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande), or some variation of salacious and tragic (Adore).

This memo is received in the new film, The Idea of You, produced by Amazon MGM Studios, and is delightfully subverted, while also exposing a fundamental truth. As the best friend sidekick in the film relays to her fraught 40-something loved-up friend played by Anne Hathaway on the subject of her blissful romance with a much younger man, “No one likes a happy woman.”

Hollywood is in on this joke, too. After all, they are capitalizing on this dynamic and aiding to perpetuate it. However, this movie is a bit of a departure because it portrays that a woman in her prime can have her cake in the form of the scrumptious Nicholas Galitzine (Cinderella, Red, White & Royal Blue) and partake in many delicious, savory tastings. Ultimately though securing her happy ending means denying herself this love as penance for actualizing the consensual attraction. Hey, it’s progress. Not perfection.

[Trailer here] The Idea of You is out on Amazon Prime.

I Want to Know What Love Is

What’s refreshingly different about this film is that it conveys an everyday, ordinary relationship between a “regular” albeit, highly attractive and successful 40-year-old woman who looks like she could be her daughter’s sister (this is also a line in the film) and a younger pop star (think One Direction). The author of the book from which the film was adapted, Robinne Lee has categorically denied that this book is in any way influenced by the real-life romance of hunky pop star, Harry Styles (formerly of One Direction) and the lithe film director and actress, Olivia Wilde, whose affair may or may not have famously contributed to the break up of her marriage to Jason Sudeikis. The author maintains that her fictional story came before theirs. Still, there’s no contesting that tongues are wagging at the easy comparisons.

I Want You To Show Me

Michael Showalter, the film’s director is an expert at rendering slower, nuanced, and inspired drama (Search Party) and poignantly directing uncomfortable and painful life moments in romance (The Big Sick, Spoiler Alert). This explains why in the first half of when the film leaned into the growing pains of the beginning of Solène and Hayes’ relationship and made us connect with these characters on emotional levels, notably why they are attracted to one another in the first place beyond the physical, it was interesting. From there, the story devolved into a bit of fast romance and a means to an end. Think Instagram Reel-ready photogenic clips of the two leading actors engaging in various staged PDAs with smiles on blast. Plus, there were too many split-screen effects for my taste which looked like a collage of virtual postcards with highly photogenic stars. As a result, I was less invested in their story by the time the couple split (sorry, slight spoiler).

Will they or won’t they end up together? This is top of mind in such films, after all.

A good friend of mine summed up the answer as such:

It’s always an experience, but not a lifestyle.

I used this mindset in watching the film and at various stages checked to see how much time had elapsed to hypothesize the couple’s fate. Chances are if 15-20 minutes before the ending of the film, the couple is apart, they will end up together. I won’t give away the ending, but the formula rang true.

The Idea of You, for all its mishegas, gave me my coveted both/and ending, acknowledging that in the age of experiential living, experience is a lifestyle.

Let’s Discuss

• What are some older woman/younger man romance films or shows that are noteworthy?

• Is “I Want To Know What Love Is” now an earworm? If so, sorry, not sorry.

• How can we better normalize finding love for women 40+ onscreen so there’s not such a big gap between an Anne Hathaway and the Diane Keaton/Meryl Streep/Jane Fonda oldies’ contingent? (recognizing the inherent age gap in the women I just rattled off). Seems like it’s JLo, who is starring in all these uninteresting rom-coms, and then Emma Thompson here and there. What needs to change?