‘People We Meet on Vacation’ Review: Undemanding Netflix Romcom Coasts on the Charms of Emily Bader and Tom Blyth
Brett Haley’s slight, sunny film tips its hat overtly if optimistically to ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ as it ponders the age-old question of whether straight men and women can maintain platonic relations.
New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry is happy to own her reputation as a merchant of breezy, disposable beach reads, to the point that her first adult novel was plainly titled “Beach Read.” The first film adaptation of a Henry title to reach the screen, beating at least three other projects in development, “People We Meet on Vacation” is similarly straightforward about its aspirations: It even opens with a wink-wink shot of its heroine reclining on a quiet beach, reading a book that may as well be one of Henry’s, before the page is spattered with some passing bird excrement from on high. With this introduction of a hapless protagonist not entirely managing to live her best life, Brett Haley‘s film cheerfully speaks both the literary and cinematic language of romantic comedy — and won’t seek to subvert or elevate it in the two hours that follow.
All of which is completely fine. A summer-soaked Netflix release cannily scheduled to counter the January fug, “People We Meet on Vacation” offers no surprises, to an audience that isn’t after any. From the second that free spirit Poppy (Emily Bader) and straitlaced Alex (Tom Blyth) meet as ill-matched college students, you know where they’re going to end up, and precisely how they’re going to end up there. Moreover, the film knows that you know: It offers the comforting satisfaction of pieces falling predictably into place to any viewers wishing their own life would slot together so neatly. “I thought I knew what I wanted in life — it turns out I had no idea,” Poppy says at one point. She’s pretty much alone in not getting the memo.
For most of the film’s nine-year timeframe, at least, what Poppy mistakenly thinks she wants is a life less obvious. One of the few things she and Alex have in common at the outset is a shared hometown in the sleepy and fictitious Linfield, Ohio, though they’ve never met before — and where she’s bursting with plans to escape the place, he’s all too eager to nest there. At the end of their final term at Boston College, he gives her a ride back to the Midwest, cuing a passive-aggressive two-day road trip. Any resemblance to the setup of “When Harry Met Sally” is not remotely coincidental, though the character dynamics are gender-flipped: Here, he’s the uptight square, and she’s the wisecracking agent of chaos.
Bar that minor variation, “People We Meet on Vacation” is wholly deferent to Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron’s standard-bearing romcom, bringing little new generational perspective to the question of whether straight men and women can be friends without sex getting in the way. (Spoiler alert: the answer is still “not in this genre, no.”) The structure is a bit tricksier, flipping between the present — which finds our two inevitable lovers estranged and in their early thirties — and a staggered series of flashbacks catching up to it.
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Having eventually become platonic friends via that post-college trip to Linfield, Poppy and Alex resolve to meet every year for a shared summer vacation, even as their lives take very different paths: hers as a jet-setting New York-based travel writer for a glossy magazine, his as a homebody academic still rooted in Ohio. The past vacation sequences, hopping from New Orleans to Tuscany to the Canadian wilderness, repeatedly stress the point of how adorkably perfect they are for each other, even as assorted other love interests keep coming between them. In the present, they’re awkwardly reunited for his brother’s destination wedding in Barcelona, following two years of mutual silent treatment. The rift isn’t explained until later, though as with everything here, you can confidently fill in the gaps.
What keeps things diverting, and sometimes even interesting, is the genuine but necessarily tentative chemistry between its stars, one staging an all-out charm offensive and the other projecting a flintier allure. Amid the big, cute, relatably klutzy gestures required of the character, Bader (“Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin,” Amazon Prime’s “My Lady Jane”) gives Poppy a groggy, between-the-lines wistfulness that’s less expected, leaving one curious to see her in more knottily written film roles. Blyth hasn’t wanted for those of late: “People We Meet on Vacation” represents quite a departure from tougher arthouse assignments like “Plainclothes,” “Wasteman” and Claire Denis’s “The Fence,” though his quiet, nervy quality goes a long way toward humanizing a character described, not unreasonably, by one of Poppy’s more glamorous exes as “a bit of a wet lettuce.”
That’s one of the tangier lines in a film that, like many of its contemporary peers in a genre lately consigned to the streamingverse, is heavier on rom than com. The script — credited to three writers, though you’d be forgiven for assuming an even larger committee — maintains a general buoyancy of tone to compensate for a shortage of outright jokes; a setpiece involving a goofily drunken dance to Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl” is the closest we get to farce. A decade on from his tender indie sleeper “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” Haley steers proceedings in more proficiently impersonal fashion, while DP Rob C. Givens takes the tonal directive “sunny” as an all-out aesthetic mission statement. Yellow-filtered to the max, the film looks veritably marinated in Hawaiian Tropic.
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