There was once an era in which romantic comedies were prestige plays, with films like Working Girl and Pretty Woman treated as respectable artistic endeavors by A-list talent. While the quality of rom-coms petered out during the 21st century, it’s alarming to see how quickly it has evaporated in the streaming era. The best rom-coms of recent years have been independent films like Rye Lane and Palm Springs, but the most attention has gone to Netflix and the churning out of star vehicles that are entirely disposable. Netflix might claim that Your Place or Mine and Love Hard broke streaming records, but there’s little evidence to suggest that their views didn’t primarily come from second-screen experiences.
People We Meet on Vacation is a qualitative step forward for Netflix based on an aesthetic level. It’s directed by Brett Haley, who made indie dramedies like The Hero and Heart Beats Loud, and does look like it could’ve played in theaters because it lacks the “streaming sheen.” A majority of Netflix rom-coms seem like they were written by a committee of executives, but People We Meet on Vacation was based on the bestselling beach read by Emily Henry. The story follows the travel writer Poppy (Emily Bader) and the teacher Alex (Tom Blyth), who share a When Harry Met Sally… inspired car trip when they drive back from Boston College to their hometown in Linfield, Ohio. Initially, their differences are exaggerated to the point of absurdity; Alex is anti-social and reserved in his curiosity, whereas Poppy is outgoing and enjoys stumbling into situations without a plan.
The first 20 minutes of People We Meet on Vacation are a testament to how much good will a film can earn based on the chemistry between its leads. The “extended road trip gone awry” is an antiquated framing device, but it's an appropriate means to get two strangers to open up to one another. A few awkward glances and missed phone calls hint at the apprehension that Poppy and Alex have about their respective families, and hint that they’ve been in such closed circles that they’re ignorant to how off-putting their behavior can be. Nothing that they say is meaningful, but it's charming enough to see one-on-one conversations during an era where a majority of communication is done digitally.
Where People We Meet on Vacation’s biggest blunder lies is its structure, which is lifted from the novel. The film is flashed forward to nine years in the future, when Poppy’s considering whether to attend the wedding of Alex’s brother, David (Miles Heizer). There’s frequent, unsubtle allusions to some sort of conflict that ended their friendship, but it puts too obvious of a trajectory on how the relationship between Alex and Poppy will evolve. The subsequent flashbacks, which are set in the nine summers that preceded the present, are all pre-empted by a callback in which the ramification is revealed. When Alex says something like “I just wish that we could go back to the way things were before Tuscany,” it's insurance that the subsequent flashback set in Tuscany will lack any suspense.
The tracking of a relationship over around nine years of time is a device that’s used to present fragmented sections, each of which could be likely clipped by Netflix to showcase as a viral video. There’s an entire segment in Squamish that has the hijinks of a Wet Hot American Summer-esque slapstick comedy, which is interesting up until the point that the film abandons that tone altogether. Even when taken as an escapist fantasy, People We Meet on Vacation is devoid of any direct references to a specific time period, which is even more confusing because the actors don’t look like they’ve aged a decade. At this point it's unrealistic for a contemporary-set film to not include any references to social media or cell phones, but that detail would force People We Meet on Vacation to commit to showing details it's not willing to include.
The novel’s appeal was linked to its release, which was in 2021 when the notion of a vacation was exciting enough on its own after a year of lockdown. It’s Obama-era wish fulfillment when two young people, unsaddled by student debts, could remain in the same job for nine years and afford to go on vacations each summer. People We Meet on Vacation didn’t need to be a commentary on class dynamics, but it’s exasperating how obsessed Alex and Poppy are with self-satisfaction when their lives are pretty cushy. There’s intelligent commentary on how people transform themselves when they’re in a relaxed environment, but the details about what Alex and Poppy do for the other 51 weeks of the year are sparse.
I can recommend the acting, with Bader’s work in particular impressive because of her relative lack of prior credits. Blyth gave a strong performance as a younger version of Donald Sutherland’s character in The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a film much better than it had any right to be, but People We Meet on Vacation suggests he can carve a persona of his own that isn’t based on replicating a New Hollywood star.