People We Meet on Vacation

I once carpooled from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to my small hometown in Northeast Ohio with a stranger. She was an attractive woman two grades above me who had a car and happened to be a Calvin student from the same Ohio town. Circumstances alone brought us together. We shared no interests, liked completely different musical genres, studied different things, and had no friends in common. We were like oil and water. Every time one of us made an effort to get to know the other, the only thing we felt was the excruciating ticking of the clock. I still remember her baffled face when she stopped at Chick-fil-A, supposing the meal would be a welcome surprise rather than a sticky controversy. We inhabited two worlds.

The most entertaining quarter of director Brett Haley’s adaptation of Emily Henry’s novel People We Meet on Vacation follows a similar premise. Poppy (Emily Bader) and Alex (Tom Blyth) rub against each other with the coarseness of sandpaper on their way back to the fictional city of Linfield, Ohio, from Boston College. Immediately disappointing is that there is nothing to recognize from their homebound trip, as the camerawork proves to be wholly uninterested in sightseeing or in otherwise capturing any of the other actual joys of traveling. (I would know since I attended graduate school at Boston University and made the same trip many times). Henry, who is also originally from Ohio, attended Hope College, the primary rival of my undergraduate alma mater and a short drive of 30 minutes away from where I began my road trip with a stranger. These personal anecdotes may seem like a digression, but feel worth mentioning because, for better or worse, they haunted my viewing experience.

The affably named Poppy is a very particular kind of Midwest Pollyanna that those from the region know too well: excessively polite, from a carefree and sheltered upper-class background (always white, usually Christian), and probably listens to little more than Taylor Swift and Disney soundtracks in her free time. (The Swift needle drop to accommodate her performance comes as no surprise.) She is annoyingly ditzy and too optimistic to come anywhere near the 2020s, so naturally she has the made-up job of a well-compensated magazine travel writer. Her foil is Alex, an organized and stereotypically Type-A person who wouldn’t know fun if it backhanded him in the face. He likes different music, has much smaller (and more local) dreams, and disdains her impulsiveness. He wants nothing to do with her at first. But gradually, as things have to go in these cheese-rich romances, the pair find things to like in each other and promise to go on a trip every summer, no matter what their lives look like and no matter who they are with. Unlike my carpool experience, these two are one Christmas setting away from stumbling onto a full Hallmark set. 

Continue reading at In Review Online.