I once carpooled from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to my small hometown in Northeast Ohio with a stranger. She was an attractive woman two grades above me who had a car and happened to be a Calvin student from the same Ohio town. Circumstances alone brought us together. We shared no interests, liked completely different musical genres, studied different things, and had no friends in common. We were like oil and water. Every time one of us made an effort to get to know the other, the only thing we felt was the excruciating ticking of the clock. I still remember her baffled face when she stopped at Chick-fil-A, supposing the meal would be a welcome surprise rather than a sticky controversy. We inhabited two worlds.
The most entertaining quarter of director Brett Haley’s adaptation of Emily Henry’s novel People We Meet on Vacation follows a similar premise. Poppy (Emily Bader) and Alex (Tom Blyth) rub against each other with the coarseness of sandpaper on their way back to the fictional city of Linfield, Ohio, from Boston College. Immediately disappointing is that there is nothing to recognize from their homebound trip, as the camerawork proves to be wholly uninterested in sightseeing or in otherwise capturing any of the other actual joys of traveling. (I would know since I attended graduate school at Boston University and made the same trip many times). Henry, who is also originally from Ohio, attended Hope College, the primary rival of my undergraduate alma mater and a short drive of 30 minutes away from where I began my road trip with a stranger. These personal anecdotes may seem like digression, but feel worth mentioning because, for better or worse, they haunted my viewing experience.
The affably named Poppy is a very particular kind of Midwest Pollyanna that those from the region know too well: excessively polite, from a carefree and sheltered upper-class background (always white, usually Christian), and probably listens to little more than Taylor Swift and Disney soundtracks in her free time. (The Swift needle drop to accommodate her performance comes as no surprise.) She is annoyingly ditzy and too optimistic to come anywhere near the 2020s, so naturally she has the made-up job of a well-compensated magazine travel writer. Her foil is Alex, an organized and stereotypically Type-A person who wouldn’t know fun if it backhanded him in the face. He likes different music, has much smaller (and more local) dreams, and disdains her impulsiveness. He wants nothing to do with her at first. But gradually, as things have to go in these cheese-rich romances, the pair find things to like in each other and promise to go on a trip every summer, no matter what their lives look like and no matter who they are with. Unlike my carpool experience, these two are one Christmas setting away from stumbling onto a full Hallmark set.
People We Meet on Vacation moves sequentially from one vacation to another (skipping several between) as the two friends age, fall in love with other people, break up, and repeat the sad, predictable cycle. The cool and gorgeous destinations don’t conceal the myopic worlds they inhabit. They plan one North American or European destination after another (Spain, Norway, Italy, etc.) because these are the kind of Midwesterners who seemingly can’t imagine a relaxing holiday in a non-white setting — or at least engaging with it on its own terms. Even in New Orleans, for instance, with one (un)memorable exception, the characters with speaking lines are almost all white and they never leave the French Quarter — instead, they bring their Midwestern world to the city. Poppy never reckons with the cultural and environmental cost of tourism the way anyone who travels for a living should be required to, and the cultures of these places are more or less interchangeable and exist solely for the use of the would-be couple. In other words, any cultural richness or singularity is flattened into homogenous rom-com backdrop. And then there’s the present timeline — Alex’s brother’s wedding in Barcelona — which anxiously lurks over these memories of past vacations that editor Evan Henke shuffles us between, with the periodic cuts to the present ruining any emotional rhythm effused by the trip-loaded past.
Likewise upsetting emotional richness is that Alex and Poppy never resolve their initial disconnect — they’re just both hot and spend a lot of time together. They build a library of shared memories and inside jokes that they reference to the relational detriment of whoever their unfortunate partners are for a given vacation, but they never really uncover mutual interests or values. The version of Alex that Poppy comes to like she even qualifies as “vacation Alex,” as if he is categorically different from the “real Alex,” and this dissonance doesn’t dissipate. They learned how to talk to each other, sure; that doesn’t mean they should actually be together though.
The Netflix adaptation then climaxes in a rainy kiss so mawkish that it should be prosecutable. But no matter how important and fulfilling the filmmakers want to make this moment, it’s a far cry from the grand romance of Titanic or Three Thousand Years of Longing. For around a decade, Alex has been in love with Poppy and was too much of a coward to do anything about it, one way or another; Poppy was too stupid and fleeting to figure out what she wanted. There is nothing grand or romantic about that. Ultimately, this is just a portrait of two people in their 30s deciding to finally move into the Ohio suburbs together. So romantic.
DIRECTOR: Brett Haley; CAST: Tom Blyth, Emily Bader, Lucien Laviscount, Sarah Catherine Hook; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: January 9; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 58 min.
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