If you’ve yet to read Robinne Lee’s The Idea of You, you’re lucky. A richly hot (and also agonizing) adventure awaits—and you’ll probably find the film version, premiering on May 2 and starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine, perfectly enjoyable. As a tortured superfan of the book, however, I can’t not see the adaptation as essentially failing the source material. The film, directed by Michael Showalter, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jennifer Westfeldt, dulls the book’s boldness, drastically diminishes its heroine, and, in an industry that fancies itself more inclusive in recent years, re-casts characters of color with white actors.
It helps to know that The Idea of You isn’t just a book, but a novelistic manifesto for middle-aged female readers. Though released in 2017, it became “the sleeper hit of the pandemic,” as I wrote for Vogue in 2020, powered by a passionate, dominantly female word-of-mouth campaign. In the throes of isolation, restlessness, and over-mothering, The Idea of You opened a portal to a glittering alternate universe, one in which a sophisticated 39-year-old L.A. art gallerist and divorcée, Solène Marchand, forges a cosmic connection with 20-year-old British boy band member Hayes Campbell, a young god written with glimmers of Harry Styles and other famous lads, including Eddie Redmayne and Prince Harry. An electric, globe-trotting affair ensues, hurtling them from Cap d’Antibes to the Hamptons and Japan.
People who love The Idea of You do so with borderline unhealthy obsessiveness. We lose sleep reading it on weeknights. We join Facebook groups about it. We re-read it and binge the audiobook narrated by Lee, a veteran actress who nails all the accents in her velvety voice. There’s even a name for us: Haysolnuts (a portmanteau inspired by the fictional couple). We’re wooed not just by the travel, the copious, deftly written sex, or the overlap between the two (Hayes ministering to Solène atop a yacht in Anguilla springs to mind), but the subversiveness of a May-December romance in which a woman is the elder; the all-too-rare “story about a woman approaching 40 and reclaiming her sexuality and rediscovering herself,” as Lee told me, “just at the point that society traditionally writes women off as desirable and viable and whole.”
The Yale-educated author knew how stories like this are typically received in a patriarchal culture and, in a meta twist, she funneled that theme into The Idea of You. “We take art that appeals to women—film, books, music—and we undervalue it,” Solène tells Hayes of his boy band, August Moon, in what became a much-shared quote, including after Barbie’s best-director snub. “We assume it can’t be high art.”
It’s a stinging indictment that stings all the more because the Prime Video adaptation of The Idea of You does just that: undervalues its source material.
The movie version of The Idea of You is less an adaptation and more a faint approximation. Perhaps its most depressing offense is shrinking Solène from a successful, self-possessed protagonist into a gooier, lesser version of herself, presumably in a bid to make her more likeable and accessible. In the novel, Solène is alluringly aspirational. She co-owns a contemporary art gallery and is a player on the international art scene, jetting to Art Basel and such. She lives in a sleek home overlooking the ocean and wears Alaïa. Yes, she’s divorced and she smarts when she learns her ex-husband, Daniel, might marry his younger girlfriend, Eva, but Solène also reveals that she bristled against the traditional roles of wife and mother before their split. (Daniel, an entertainment lawyer billing endless hours, didn’t support her career relaunch after having their daughter, Isabelle.) “I want to do things that feed me,” Solène says in the book. “I want to surround myself with art and fascinating people and stimulating experiences…and beauty. I want to surprise myself.”
Showalter’s The Idea of You dims Solène in every way. Instead of allowing her to be stifled by marriage, it defaults to a trope: Daniel cheated, leaving her heartbroken to the point of crying on her first “date” with Hayes. (It’s not hot foreplay.) To assure audiences she’s truly shattered, Solène shares that she would have taken Daniel back, too, if he hadn’t left her for Eva. Cue the “Debbie Downer” sound effect as The Idea of You devolves into what Hathaway calls “a movie about a woman healing her heart after a massive trust trauma.” The teary conversation unfolds in the kitchen of Solène’s quaint “starter home,” as she describes it. Her gallery, too, has been minimized to one tiny room, because she’s no longer permitted to be glamorous or powerful. When Hayes pays her a surprise visit at work, he buys her entire inventory in five minutes flat, instantly freeing her to join him on August Moon’s world tour—never mind her career ambitions or sense of purpose.
Hollywood will Hollywood, but the changes to The Idea of You’s central character feel almost too predictably reductive. Why does Solène have to be small and scorned to be broadly likable to streaming audiences? Why can’t she be a depiction of fantastical success, like untold heavy-hitting male characters onscreen? Why does she have to be crunchily relatable instead of living a big, interesting, sometimes scandalously sexual life? It demeans viewers to assume we couldn’t possibly see ourselves in a woman like that. It ignores the fact that we already did—when we read Lee’s words.
The Idea of You movie takes a story relished for its daring and dials it back to something safer and more tepid. Instead of 20, Galitzine’s Hayes is 24—presumably because narrowing the age gap between him and Solène, who turns 40 in both versions, makes it more palatable. Strange, because Lee’s novel went viral with that 20-year spread, the kind routinely accepted in real life matches between older men and younger women. Galitzine, who’s enjoying a casting boon from Red, White Royal Blue to Bottoms, charms as Hayes, but Showalter and Westfeldt demote the well-groomed British character to a goofball, making him less believably appealing to a grown woman. Lee’s Hayes studies art books in an effort to get on Solène’s level. In the movie, he sings into a chicken finger microphone.
In another swap that doesn’t serve the story, Solène’s daughter, Isabelle, is no longer 12-turning-13 and obsessed with Hayes, but 16 and into St. Vincent, skewering August Moon as “so seventh grade”—because the film likely thought it would be too terrible (and, God forbid, actually flawed and complex) for Solène to be secretly sleeping with her daughter’s celebrity crush. Unfortunately, these tweaks also effectively lower the stakes and kill the book’s most emotional sources of tension. The chances of a feasible future for a 20-year-old man and 40-year-old woman set them up for heartbreak; Solène is continuously torn up over how the relationship and the cancers of celebrity culture impact her daughter—an idea the movie broaches but with less drama.
The film’s changes are even more discomfiting when I consider the context: that a majority-white creative team co-opted a Black author’s story and white-washed her characters of color. At the helm of Prime Video’s The Idea of You were director Showalter, screenwriter Westfeldt, and producers Cathy Schulman and Gabrielle Union. (Schulman “led the creation of this viral book into a film,” according to an email pitch from her publicist.) Prime Video credits Lee as a producer, but the author has said she was not involved in the production.
In their hands, key characters of color are—quite boldly in 2024—cast with white actors. Most notably, Solène’s confidante and gallery co-owner, Lulit—who, in the novel, muses on Basquiat in her Ethiopian accent—is replaced with Tracy (Annie Mumolo), whose entire personality is a preoccupation with Solène’s love life. Eva, written by Lee as a “half Dutch, half Chinese” upstart at Daniel’s firm, is also played by a white actress, as is Izzy’s formerly Black best friend, Georgia. Neither introducing Zeke, a new Black friend of Izzy’s, nor making members of August Moon (who barely speak in the film) more diverse excuses reimagining these crucial supporting characters.
Adaptations always take liberties; if it were really faithful, Showalter’s The Idea of You would have an X rating. But the Prime Video film fails to capture the very essence of the novel. It fancies itself about a middle-aged woman in the throes of self-discovery, society’s sexism and ageism be damned. “People hate happy women,” Tracy muses in Solène’s kitchen. But the film applies that very same sexist, ageist judgment to Lee’s story. Solène is allowed to date a younger man—but not too young. She’s single—but not of her own volition. She can’t be a power-player in her industry—she has to be so small-time, her famous boyfriend can Supermarket Sweep through her gallery on a whim. People hate happy women? Maybe. But this movie hates truly transgressive ones.
