(courtesy IMDb)
It’s always with a little bit of your heart in your mouth vibe that you approach any adaptation of a book by a favourite author.
Will it feel even remotely like the book? (For the record, I am not a precious reader and I’m happy give adaptations a chance and if they’re good, give them their due.) Will I recognise the characters? And will the ending land as well as it did when it was purely houses in pages of ink and paper?
Thankfully in the case of People We Meet on Vacation, which is based on Emily Henry’s second novel for adults – prior to her breakout bestselling success as a superlatively good romcom author, Henry wrote and released excellent YA fiction – this reviewer has only read from the third novel, Book Lovers on, so walking into this film, or rather slumping on the bed to stream it, did not come with a load of preset expectations.
BUT, and this is key, I have long watched and read many, many romcoms, and so while I was watching without a very specific eye about what worked and what didn’t vis-a-vis the book, I was judging it in the general sense I bring to any romantic comedy which is “Is it as good as something the late great Nora Ephron might have done?”
I’m kidding, well partly, but you can’t help but watch any romcom movie with an eagle eye on whether all the confected, escapist goings-on deliver some sort of serious emotional pay-off.
No pay-off or one that feels like it’s been run through an existential photocopier one too many times, and you have to wonder why on earth you devoted a couple of hours to two people meet-cuting, falling in love and after an inevitable kink in the Cupidian road, declaring their undying love for each other that pays no heed to reality, circumstances or how much that last-minute desperate trip to the airport cost in Uber fares.
So, while People We Meet on Vacation wasn’t being harshly critiqued, or even mildly so, in the rosy glow of a finished book, it was being evaluated for the way in which it made me feel because at the end of the day, no matter how delightful the characters or wittily smart and amusing the dialogue, what you feel as the blessed couple kiss and murmur and finally admit their true hearts’ desires is what really matters.
And unfortunately, People We Meet on Vacation simply doesn’t stick the landing.
Now, that’s not to say that it wasn’t fun to watch in many respects, which is a relief frankly because there’s nothing worse than diving into a romcom and finding it has the romantic vibe of week-old fish mouldering in a dumpster in a back alley in full sun in the middle of summer (yes, yes, I know you can simply switch off when in streaming mode but somehow that rarely happens as if we’ve decided that we must pay for the foolishness of our streaming decision-making and must see this blighted hellhole of a movie out).
The screenplay by Yulin Kuang, Amos Vernon and Nunzio Randazzo clearly benefits from Henry’s gift for dialogue that leaps happily and boisterously off the pages and which communicates so much that you get a feeling for the characters very quickly and fully, crucial if you are to completely enter into the conceit of love arrived at in furiously fast fashion, which is the bread and butter of romcoms.
Split between a fraught present day where BFFs, exuberantly weird and bubbly Poppy (Emily Bader), a travel journalist with a dream job holidaying for a living, and far more circumspect and careful Alex (Tom Blyth) are trying to pick up the broken pieces of their friendship at a wedding in Barcelona, and past summer holidays the two close friends have undertaken over almost a decade, People We Meet on Vacation is full to the brim of happily arrived and joyously delivered romcom contrivances.
We love the weird coincidences and reality-defying happenstance of romcoms – what’s the point of a story like this if it feels too much like real life? Defy the normal and conjure the fantasy life of my dreams, please! – and People We Meet on Vacation has them in pleasing multitudinous abundance.
So, no issues with how romcom-y it all feels which is frothy, confected and the case of the New Orleans holiday flashback in particular, buoyantly fun and lovely.
Where things fall down, and oddly so because Henry’s books all feel like perfect distillations of romcom wonder and charm, is that People We Meet on Vacation never really makes you care about the two people at the centre of the story.
Which is odd when you think about because so much of the romcom recipe is presented and accounted for and perfectly baked into place.
It’s hard to define what goes wrong but for all the fun and frivolity and zingy vivacity of many of the scenes, and this is primarily due to Bader’s exuberant if stereotypical portrayal of the classic manic pixie girl, People We Meet on Vacation feels curiously inert.
It’s like there’s all this sound and fury signifying big ticket, huge “R” romance but nothing to see when everything goes quiet and the flirting dust settles.
You know something is wrong when the big reconciliation happens, which by the way is both heartfelt and a trading away of Poppy’s dreams of escaping her hometown for somewhere better, and you feel next to nothing when you should be feeling EVERYTHING.
EVERYTHING.
But it’s almost like somehow along the way, all of the flirting and banter and dialogue that couldn’t survive in the real world (but god, you wish it could), all of the stuff that’s supposed to make you feel stuff weirdly leached away, and while People We Meet on Vacation is a delight in many ways, it’s pressing all the romantic buttons and frothing all the gushy love ingredients and not much of anything substantial emerges which is a real pity because there’s so much potential here, a lot of which seems to go nowhere, and certainly not anywhere near your heart.