Joel on Film

Generally speaking, romantic comedies need a bit more than the chemistry between lead actors to work, and here’s an example of that truth in action. People We Meet on Vacation is an adaptation of a 2021 novel by Emily Henry, and the fact that this material comes from such source material is something of a great surprise. There is nothing, save perhaps for the fact that the story unfolds over the course of about a decade in the lives of its characters, that suggests a novelistic origin, and even that elongated time period—at least, in movie form—mostly resonates as part of the storytelling gimmick at the center of director Brett Haley’s movie.

To be fair upfront and to give the movie some credit, it does have two reasonably effective and obviously attractive actors in the two leading roles in Emily Bader and Tom Blyth, whose efforts go a long way toward convincing us that their respective characters, Poppy and Alex, probably deserve to be together. So much noise is made at the start about these two and their wildly different outlooks on life, love and the banalities of both that we would be foolish to expect any deviation from the ultimate destination of this story. If noting something as obvious as that can be considered a “spoiler,” well, no prospective reader of this review will ever have watched a romantic comedy before.

It’s a simple, but unfortunate, truth that the filmmakers, including a committee of three screenwriters (Yulin Kuang, Amos Vernon and Nunzio Randazzo), haven’t done as convincing a job of allowing this material to escape its predictable and frustrating formula, which is to flash back and forth between the representative present and various points in the past shared by Poppy, a feature writer for a major publication, and Alex, who so lacks distinction as a character that his occupation either is never revealed or has slipped this critic’s mind. In the present, Poppy is weighing the options regarding a bit of travel. Alex’ younger brother (played by Miles Heizer in a wasteful role) is getting married, and as Alex is in the wedding party, he naturally makes certain that Poppy gets an invitation.

The problem is that Poppy and Alex are, by now, former best friends, due to events that, obviously, must be revealed over the course of the flashbacks in the story. We see the pair’s cute meeting, when Alex was employed as Poppy’s driver for a long road trip, and some of their later misadventures, such as a big misunderstanding in the middle of a makeshift sex camp that led to Alex going nude in front of his opposite-gendered best friend. Don’t ask.

That’s a pretty silly idea, although things become relatively more serious as the film moves forward, chronicling the various missed dates and more misunderstandings and the ways in which each of these people either willfully ignores or intentionally puts off the blaring truth of their friendship until the movie contrives for them to deal with it as adults. Once that point arrives, there are some hard truths about the nature of this friendship, but it costs quite a lot to get there, including our meeting the pair’s significant others along the journey to you-know-where. Poppy’s boyfriend, Trey (Lucien Laviscount), is a bit of a bore in that he’s defined entirely by how much the opposite he is from Alex.

Alex’ girlfriend, though, presents an unusual challenge for Haley and the screenwriting team: She’s Sarah, and as played by a quite-good Sarah Catherine Hook, the character is far more interesting, more charismatic, and better developed than either lead. She is already Alex’ girlfriend when we meet everyone involved in the story, which means that someone is going to be hurt by the inevitable outcome of the whole affair (if you’ll forgive the turn of phrase). Hook is so good here, in fact, that a final confrontation between her and another character—especially since, by that point, certain irrevocable things have happened—carries with it a sting that nearly every other scene simply lacks.

It’s a brief but potent glimpse of the kind of movie People We Meet on Vacation, so devoted to its preordained conclusion, could have been but, despite the charm of the leads, isn’t (that is also wastes the likes of Molly Shannon and Alan Ruck, appearing in glorified cameos as Poppy’s parents, and strands Jameela Jamil as her editor is just salt rubbed into the wound). The movie winds up covering so much of these characters’ lives, over so long a period, that it somehow circles back around to giving us at least three scenes of Poppy and/or Alex separately running to catch up to their love interest—a sign of shallow storytelling, indeed.

Rating: ** (out of ****)