People We Meet on Vacation: 📕 or 🎥?
I've kind of given up on reading the book before seeing the movie. There's too many movies and too many books. Honestly, I was relieved when I saw that Netflix was making a movie of Emily Henry'sPeople We Meet on Vacation. I've already read two of her books, Book Lovers and Great Big Beautiful Life, and now I could take PWMoV off my absurd TBR list and just watch the movie instead. When the time came and I was settled on my couch with cinnamon toast and hot tea, I was suitably dazzled by this charming, attractive rom-com. But at various times, when I found a plot point or character beat wanting, I found myself thinking, "I bet that's better in the book."
Poppy (Emily Bader) and Alex (Tom Blyth) attend the same college and are from the same small town, but otherwise they have nothing in common. Poppy is a free spirit who sees life as a series of exciting adventures, while Alex is fussy and likes to stick to a plan. Alex agrees to drive Emily home for summer vacation, but the trip quickly unravels as Emily's messy habits screw up Alex's itinerary. Over the course of the drive, Alex comes to appreciate Poppy's ability to go with the flow. They agree to travel together for one week every summer. Ten years later, Poppy has her dream job but is consumed with ennui, while Alex still lives in their small hometown but has just broken up with his long-time girlfriend. Alex's brother is getting married in Barcelona, so Poppy drops everything to see if they can make the vacation magic last forever.
There's a lot to like about this movie. Poppy and Alex's globe-trotting adventures bring them to gorgeous locations, and the settings are attractive and appealing. And it's no hardship to watch two beautiful people stare longingly at each other for a few hours. The banter is snappy and clever, and I'm betting big sections are lifted directly from the book. That's one of the benefits of adapting a popular novel. But one of the drawbacks is that a movie rarely captures the depth of characters that it needed to make a novel work. Without a deep connection between the characters, the movie ultimately feels like pleasant eye candy without much substance.
The early scenes of the movie, where Poppy and Alex meet, are clearly an homage to When Harry Met Sally... It is a mistake to reference one of the greatest rom-coms of all time because it invites comparisons that PWMoV isn't prepared to meet. The magic of When Harry Met Sally... is that the main characters are actually friends who have a lived-in relationship. Poppy and Alex, on the other hand, communicate mostly by text except for one week a year, when they are both far from their normal lives. They don't even really know what it's like to hang out on a day-to-day basis, and their relationship is based largely on fantasies about what it would be like to be together.
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And those fantasies have got to be great, because Bader and Blyth are both hot as hell. They look incredible in every scene. Which also makes it hard to comprehend why these two hot youngsters don't just bang it out already. The movie tells us that Poppy is commitment-phobic and that Alex is tied to the hometown she hates, but it never explains why. At one point, Alex's brother says that Poppy is "like family," but as far as we know she's never spent any time back home. I was left feeling like there was a lot of story that got left on the cutting room floor in favor of slo-mo sequences of Emily Bader in a chartreuse dress.
And to be clear, I really enjoyed watching Emily Bader walk around in outrageous outfits. She was compelling and charming in PWMoV, and I thought she was great in My Lady Jane. I was less impressed by Tom Blyth, who seems to have a limited library of facial expressions. Their combined hotness actually might be one of the problems with the movie. To make a friends-to-lovers rom-com work, you need one or both of the characters to be insecure about the other's attraction to them. Neither one of these people could ever question that the other is hot for them. They are too hot to ever question their hotness.
Will I end up reading this book? Honestly, probably not. There are currently 292 books on my TBR, guys, don't be mad. The movie is totally enjoyable on its own, and I gave it four stars on Letterboxd. But it has made me want to read more Emily Henry books, and it has made me excited for future Netflix adaptations of popular romance novels. It looks like we'll get Christina Lauren's In a Holidaze for Christmas this year, which I haven't read. Ooh, it's a time-loop romance! Whelp, so much for taking books off my TBR list.
How many books are on your TBR? Let me know!