Stream It or Skip It?

People We Meet on Vacation (now on Netflix) opens with a shot of star Emily Bader lounging on the beach with a book, and a passing seagull splats its excretory deposit smack on the page she’s reading. Funny, considering the film adapts the bestselling novel by Emily Henry, whose first book was audaciously titled Beach Read. But that’s where the cheeky self-awareness ends, as the film, from director Brett Haley (YA Netflicks All the Bright Places, All Together Now) is content to be a fairly standard rom with a decent amount of com. Bader and Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes star Tom Blyth play besties who sure seem ripe to progress past the friend zone, within a concept that finds them taking annual summer vacations together. Now let’s see if the stars’ charms can transcend the gimmick.

The Gist: We meet Poppy (Bader) while she’s voicing over about how you can “be another version of yourself” while you’re on vacation. And she would know – as a travel writer, she goes on vacations for a living. Let it be known that we never really see her “working” on these trips; she mostly eats in nice restaurants and chills on beaches and sleeps in hotel rooms that don’t look remotely affordable to the average person, and she never seems to take any notes or interview people or do any of the stuff that writers do. But we’re not mashing the PLAY button to see her type on a laptop, I guess. We’re here to hang around for 43 minutes before the movie even gets to the gimmick, and the romantic tension she cultivates with Alex (Blyth) within an odd couple/opposites attract conceit.

Alex and Poppy met, per a splashy subtitle, NINE SUMMERS AGO when they were strangers carpooling from Boston College back to their humble hometown of Linfield, Ohio. That was quite the ordeal involving a burrito mess in his Subaru, a disagreement over the appeal of saxophone in pop music, keys getting locked in the car and a night in a motel where he slept on the floor and she slept on the bed and never the twainsies shall meet. I mean, they’re absolutely not meant for each other ever ever, never in this universe ever: She’s a loosey-goofy chatterbox who squirts an ungodly amount of ketchup on her breakfast and he’s an uptight ungoofy type who wrinkles his nose at ungodly amounts of ketchup. She’s single and he’s in a long-term relationship with his high school sweetie. They disagree on the appeal of Linfield – he’s a homebody who values the small town and her wanderlust dictates that she pretty much exists to escape such small towns. But they became true platonic pals on that trip, and kept in touch. 

It’s now THIS SUMMER and Poppy’s reluctant to jet to Barcelona for a wedding. Alex’s brother is getting married there. And there was some sort of falling-out between Poppy and Alex that resulted in them not talking for the last two years. Why? We’ll get there – eventually. First we have to jump back to EIGHT SUMMERS AGO when Poppy and Alex went camping in Canada and he wanted to follow a guidebook and she wanted to just wing it and they ended up just winging it through some comic mishaps and had such a great time that they vowed to take a summer vacay together every year. The narrative jumps between the present day – when Poppy is in a personal slump, discontent with her job and apparently pretty lonely – and fun trips to, say, New Orleans, where they pretended to be newlyweds so they could get free beignets and booze. In the present, bummed-out Poppy goes to Barcelona and runs into Alex at the airport, rekindling the tension. And the flame? Sure seemed like there was at least a spark or 10 or 20 between them on all those fun vacays. As the guy once said, WHA’ HAPP’N’D?  

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Few films toe the line between the Friend Zone and the Genital-mashing Zone like When Harry Met Sally.

Performance Worth Watching: Bader’s appeal resides on the spectrum between Marisa Tomei and Anna Kendrick, which is a nice place to be – she shifts naturally and convincingly among comedy, drama and the gray area between them.  

Sex And Skin: Butts and sideboob during a skinnydipping sequence and some stylized sexytimes, all firmly within the PG-13 sphere.

Our Take: People We Meet on Vacation is engineered to be predictably satisfying, and offers few real surprises. It’s generally content to be vague on character details and heavy on the romantic yearning, rendering it less substantial than it could be. But if you’re a sucker for an appealing central performance and some sweetly alchemical interactions between two attractive human beings (disclosure: I am one of those suckers), the movie offers an opportunity to forget about your troubles for a bit so you can yell JUST DO IT AND GET IT OVER WITH!!! at your television for two hours. 

Although Haley seems to forget how cinematically picturesque some of the locations shoots can be – that’s a direct-to-streaming movie for you, I guess – he manages to ably build and maintain the will they/won’t they dramatic tension during the middle hour. And while we’re subject to a few rom-com cliches – a silly dance sequence that attempts to reanimate Paula Abdul’s ‘Forever Your Girl,’ scenes stolen by bit players (in this case, Molly Shannon and Alan Ruck), etc. – tonally, the film skews ever so slightly more serious, therefore convincing us that Alex and Poppy are people with good hearts who deserve the happiness they seek. 

Case in point, a conversation between our principals where they debate the notions of settling and compromise. How can you tell which is which, especially when you’re in the middle of it, drowning in your own conflicting emotions? The push-pull between the pragmatism of daily life (represented by sensible Alex) and the illogic of love (represented by loose-nut Poppy) drives People We Meet on Vacation, and therefore prevents it from being too cutesy. It flirts with being a syrupy fantasy, and devolves into contrivance on occasion (there are 340 million people in America, and when the protagonist needs to run into the one person who’ll fill a plot hole, there she is, strolling through the airport), but at its core, the movie isn’t afraid to stir a bit of realism into its idealism. Some might find that dull for something selling itself as a rom-com, but for those of us who need just a little bit more emotional oomph, it’s just right. 

Our Call: Would you strike up a conversation with Alex and Poppy if they were lying next to you by the resort pool? Yeah, sure, why not? STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.