The Idea of You review: What comes between Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine’s romance is their age difference, as filtered through social media. But The Idea of You has no idea of how to take it forward, or to even leave it sideways.
There is a film out there about what happens when a famous celebrity falls in love with the owner of a quaint store. That would be Notting Hill, the film you would be better off watching than this tepid Netflix release, where Anne ‘The Princess Diaries’ Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine, the closeted gay prince from Amazon’s diligently sizzling Red, White and Royal Blue, take a romp in several luxurious beds and raise barely enough spark to light a matchstick.
In what the film clearly considers a bold departure, what’s different is that Hathaway’s Solene (an art gallery owner) is 16 years older than Galitzine’s Hayes (a boy band heartthrob). When they are thrown together due to circumstances that are extremely contrived, he falls hook, line and sinker – for pretty hazy reasons. She resists, even if the film bluntly establishes that as a 40-year-old divorcee raising a teenage daughter (Rubin, a wrong choice, as she looks far older than 16 and too close to Hathaway in age), Solene doesn’t have much fun in her life.
