I'm actually not here to talk about the melancholy of Showalter's films. I just couldn't figure out a better intro into the piece.
I'm actually talking about my favorite film of his since Hello My Name is Doris, which has just been released on Amazon and which is called The Idea of You. And since I have a lot of random observations springing from it, that intro was as good as any.
The first is that you would call this a romantic comedy except that, despite some light or whimsical moments, it's really not a comedy. "Romantic drama" sounds heavy so when I review it I will probably just call it a "romance."
It's the story of a 40-year-old woman (Anne Hathaway) with a 16-year-old daughter who ends up in a relationship with the frontman of a boy band (Nicholas Galitzine) -- the same boy band her daughter obsessed about when she was 11 or 12. That's a good premise and it's the sort of thing that got me in the door, despite appearances from this poster and elsewhere that this could be yet another interchangeable romance gone straight to the streamers. (It was only later that I noticed it was directed by Showalter, which piqued my interest further.)
Hathaway's Solene meets Galitzine's Hayes because Solene's ex-husband was supposed to take their daughter and her friends to Coachella, but at the last minute had to drop out of the excursion because of a sudden business trip to Houston. He'd already purchased tickets to a meet-and-greet with August Moon (great name for a boy band, reminds me of Maroon 5), a sign of his being out of step with his daughter's interests. (She's now into "aggressively talented female singer-songwriters.") But they had all agreed to go to the meet-and-greet because he'd already bought the tickets, but now that he's not going at all, Solene agrees to take his place, while her daughter's friends do mostly other Coachella-related activities while grudgingly being nice and showing up for the meet-and-greet. She meets Hayes by thinking she's going to a VIP bathroom, which is actually his trailer, and things go from there.
For starters I wanted to take about this movie really pulling me in with its Coachella setting. I don't know that I've seen another film that had any part set at Coachella -- I suppose that could have been one of the stops in A Star is Born, but I'm not checking to be sure -- and it brought me right back to my festival days. I attended Coachella from 2005 to 2007, which means that among other great acts (The Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Nine Inch Nails) I was present for the performance that has probably attained the most legendary status of any live show I have attended, which was Daft Punk's 2006 appearance. Aware only in retrospect what sort of classic set this is considered to be, I started to watch it on YouTube the other day before decided I needed to wait for a time when it was more convenient for my schedule.
The thing I think is funny about how Coachella is used in this movie is that there is a sly commentary on how far the festival has fallen since those glory days. It's sly enough that you won't be aware of it at all if you are not "in the know" like I am. But I have to imagine that Showalter would know (he's also the writer) that Coachella, in its original incarnation, would never have welcomed a band like August Moon to the mainstage. Coachella was envisioned as the anti-boy band festival, its roots primarily in electronica but always open to major rock and rap acts that had a certain level of credibility. (Plus all the dozens of smaller acts on smaller stages.) Appearances by Madonna (in the year I was there in 2007, but not the day I was there) and Beyonce, while lauded, are not Coachella's bread and butter, and they probably signalled the opening of the main stage to much more mainstream fare. August Moon would be a prime example of that.
Yet the thing that's really lovely about The Idea of You is that it does not view this band as a joke. Almost any boy band representation in the movies over the years has been for the purposes of humor, but Showalter's film takes the band seriously. He's not arguing that they are great musicians, but he's arguing that they are real people with real feelings and emotions, and that the songs they make are actually catchy for the right reasons. We hear four or five August Moon songs in this movie, and they are all credible versions of boy band songs, not obvious parodies designed to feed our sense of superiority. (Songwriter and producer Savan Kotecha, who has written songs for actual boy band One Direction, was responsible for these.)
It's not the only thing in this movie that "shows us the expertise," which is dangerous in a movie but which I listened to a podcast about the other day. The podcast talked about the making of real 70s era music, that was really supposed to sound great, for the Broadway show Stereophonic. The episode also cautioned about the pitfalls of doing this, giving Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip as an example. In this hour-long drama about a Saturday Night Live-style variety show, the snippets we got of the comedy sketches were awful. I hear Mr. Holland's Opus, which I have not seen, is also an example of this, where when we hear the titular composition it is a cacophonous mess.
So not only does the August Moon music sound good, but there's a painting that plays a role in the narrative that is also supposed to be brilliant. Solene, an art dealer, says when she looks at it, she feels "everything." I think you might be inclined to agree:
The lighting in this particular screen grab available on the internet is not ideal to convey the multitudes this painting contains, but let me assure you, it contains multitudes.
I'll circle around and finish with the part of this subject that relates to Nicholas Galitzine, an actor whose name and faced I recognized, but had to look him up on IMDB to remember that he plays the main asshole jock in last year's Bottoms.
And one day after my latest coincidences post regarding Jon Hamm and John Slattery, I'm back with another coincidence.
On Saturday night my younger son was sleeping over at his aunt's house. We usually watch Young Sheldon together as a family during one or two weekend night dinners per weekend, but without the youngest there, we didn't want to continue on with it. (And if you think Young Sheldon is beneath you or would be beneath me, you haven't watched that show.)
So we decided to introduce our 13-year-old to Seinfeld over dinner instead. (It helped that I'd seen Jerry Seinfeld's Unfrosted the night before.) In seeking out a classic episode that basically had nothing to do with sex -- sex stuff makes him kind of antsy -- I landed on the Kenny Rogers Roaster episode, which is also the episode where Elaine puts the expensive Russian hat on the Peterman expense account for George. As a strategy to get a second date with the saleswoman, who clearly loathes him, George then "accidentally" leaves the expensive hat behind her couch cushion, so he'll have a reason to contact her again.
Galitzine's character Hayes did the exact same thing in this movie about an hour after I'd finished watching George do it.
The need for the action is slightly more debatable, as Solene clearly likes him. But she's also concerned about what "people will say" (rightly so, it turns out) so is making gestures about it not being a good idea to increase the intensity with Hayes. As he's leaving her house, he surreptitiously deposits his expensive watch on her entryway table, meaning it can't be the last time the two are in contact.
Hey, if it worked for Costanza, it can work for anybody.
And in case you forget, it did actually work for Costanza, to a point. Using the theme from the "By Mennen" ad that we all knew back in the 1990s, she gets Costanza in her head -- "Coooo-stanza." Unfortunately, he's already screwed it up by bringing the clock he stole from her house to exchange with the hat, thinking that was the only reason she was meeting him, when in fact, she was interested in pursuing the relationship. "Was" -- because as soon as she learns he stole her clock, she's out again.
We never do find out what happened to the hat.
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