“Anyone But You” depicts anyone but the working class

Will Gluck’s semi-charming, but oblivious romantic comedy screens at the Memorial Union Terrace on July 29.

In the modern era, the date-night movie is a rare bird, as elusive as be-all and end-all comic-book adaptations are smothering. Hollywood has attempted a sort of renaissance in the past 13 months with films like Gene Stupnitsky’s No Hard Feelings, Vanessa Caswill’s Love At First Sight, and Will Gluck’s Anyone But You, the most runaway hit of them all.

Ahead of its 2023 holiday-season release, Anyone But You‘s shapely costars Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell were ubiquitous on the press circuit’s mutant entanglement with social media. And that’s for good reason; the two actors wake up as the embodiment of questionably aspirational beauty standards. Neither was shy in sharing frisky anecdotes, and wearing interminable smiles while teasing one another in front of the cameras. Their public personae existed as both subtle and unsubtle extensions of their destined, very not-working-class characters in the film. But, okay, Sweeney and Powell are generally endearing as a couple at first (or 23rd) sight, and so the off-movie screen bombardment of their togetherness informed the public’s expectations of their on-screen charms here.

In some regard, the framework of Anyone But You is passable, held together by occasionally sharp humor by Gluck and co-screenwriter Ilana Wolpert (based on a story she wrote, which is a liberal riff on Shakespeare’s 17th-century comedy, Much Ado About Nothing). Sweeney’s unlucky-in-love law-school student Bea and Powell’s “29-year-old” investment banker guy Ben have to feign cooperation and even attraction for the sake of their family and friends’ destination wedding in Sydney, Australia (in part chosen for that Sydney connection?).

Six months prior, Bea and Ben had a Boston coffee shop meet-cute that turned grotesque, and they’ve both held onto viciously petty resentments. (It’s quite a flimsy misunderstanding, and nothing a one-minute apology wouldn’t clear up, predictably.) Anyone who’s familiar with the crowd-pleasing formula knows that their spite will sweeten over time, as Bea and Ben will be forced to open up about their vulnerabilities when they aren’t guardedly performing for others.

But that doesn’t speak to Anyone But You‘s most glaring issue, somewhat literally—the overlit look of the film, lacking in any visual identity, glowing like a travelogue or Aussie reality TV show. The drone shots intend to capture the expanse of space down under rather than prioritize the human drama. That’s because there’s nothing really at stake here, and there’s nothing distinctive about the plot by design. Progressively, it feels like a not-so-surreptitiously calibrated coordination with the New South Wales ministry of culture and tourism to glorify resorts and wealthy vacation spots like Terrey Hills, Marks Park, and Palm Beach to inspire other recently engaged viewers to book their nuptials out of their home countries.

And so the film comes to produce a kind of numbing, unromantic remoteness. Bea and Ben’s straight affair is just an insipid depiction of luxury and success, a “you-could-experience-this by traveling ’round the world!” All these designer-dressed folks have to worry about are their emotions, because money is no object. There isn’t a practical relationship to actual working people; it’s just a fantasy, and therefore, ultimately (and strangely), not so different or distinctive from all the superhero and CGI-“enhanced” fare populating other cinema screens—or, in this case, at the Memorial Union Terrace this Monday, July 29, at 9 p.m. By all means, pull up a chair with your date at dusk, soak up the leads’ chemistry and the silly fake-stakes scenarios (and the wearying nostalgia of Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten“), but also think about the implications of real people’s stories gone untold.