It was a glorious final night at the South By Southwest Film & TV Festival, and the team closed out with another Amazon/MGM release with THE IDEA OF YOU from filmmaker Michael Showalter, no stranger to SxSW with his previous movies HELLO, MY NAME IS DORIS and THE BIG SICK both having very memorable screenings at the festival. While I didn’t love this movie (more on that below), the screening itself went off wonderfully, with a teary Anne Hathaway in attendance who made such a lovely remark about the audience experience and how the reaction was something that she would never forget.
ABOUT: THE IDEA OF YOU centers on Solène, a 40-year-old single mom who begins an unexpected romance with 24-year-old Hayes Campbell, the lead singer of August Moon, the hottest boy band on the planet. When Solène must step in to chaperone her teenage daughter’s trip to the Coachella Music Festival after her ex bails at the last minute, she has a chance encounter with Hayes and there is an instant, undeniable spark. As they begin a whirlwind romance, it isn’t long before Hayes’ superstar status poses unavoidable challenges to their relationship, and Solène soon discovers that life in the glare of his spotlight might be more than she bargained for.
Jason’s Reaction: Far from perfect and nowhere near as entertaining as Michael Showalter’s earlier works, THE IDEA OF YOU almost depicts itself in its title with a somewhat odd, forbidden romance of a generous age gap that I wonder how it would all work if the gender roles were reversed. Some of Showalter’s traditions from his older movies, like how he uses all of his supporting characters with three dimensions DOES tend to work in the long run. This get-together, break-up circle gets a bit tired pretty quickly. Yet both Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine are still rather good together with some solid chemistry, and I also liked the performance from young Ella Rubin who plays Hathaway’s daughter, who also bears a striking similarity to Hathaway. It ends on an odd note which left me a bit disappointed, however, yet perhaps my reaction is a bit more negative because this was chosen as the closing night movie of a major film festival. Oddly enough, this is a light recommendation for something to watch on Amazon Prime on a quiet night when you need a kind of escapist movie, rather than something you would venture out to see in a cinema.
