In a way, People We Meet on Vacation is the ultimate test of whether the Netflix takeover of Warner Brothers (and attempted takeover of the movie industry entirely) can be successful. The movie is based on Emily Henry’s novel of the same name. The novel itself reads exactly like a quintessential studio romantic comedy. It’s full of tension, flashbacks, slightly embarrassing moments, tenderness, and miscommunications. The protagonists are likable and charming. The settings are described so thoroughly that you can picture each vacation destination immediately. The dialogue is witty and flirty.
And yet, despite having the perfect blueprint, Netflix fell short. People We Meet on Vacation is one step forward, two steps back for the romantic comedy genre. Importantly, the one step forward was a big one–we finally got two leads with genuine chemistry! Unfortunately, the two steps back feel just as big.
When discussing an adaptation, it’s important to acknowledge that film and books are two completely different forms of media. There are benefits and drawbacks to both, and people often consume them for different reasons. Therefore, it’s impossible for a film adaptation of a written story to capture the experience of reading the story. Minor changes are inevitable, particularly because there are constraints on a film set that an author doesn’t have to consider.
That being said, when adapting a romance novel, filmmakers need to consider why readers consume romance in the first place. Romance novels are predictable, full of familiar tropes, and guaranteed to have a happy ending. Readers know this, authors know this, everyone knows this. People watch romance movies for the same reason. The stories are hardly novel on their own. A great romance is told through its characters. Romance readers are looking for characters they can connect to. This is where Netflix made its biggest mistake.
At its heart, Emily Henry’s novel is about two unlikely friends, brought together by chance in college, who maintain their friendship through yearly vacations. Simple enough. What makes the novel special is that they are two unlikely friends who build a platonic foundation, earning each other’s trust and committing to making their friendship work. Over the course of 12 years, Alex and Poppy fall in love with each other, but the tension builds as they don’t want to ruin their friendship, and they believe they want different things.
The film adaptation makes several changes; some to condense the plot to fit into a reasonable runtime, but some of the changes feel wholly unnecessary, like removing the backstory of Alex’s mother’s death. Every change destroyed the care for the characters that Emily Henry built in the novel. Instead of meeting while single, building a platonic friendship, Movie Alex and Movie Poppy meet while Movie Alex is in a long-term relationship with his high school sweetheart Sarah, completely altering his character’s motivations. Movie Alex and Movie Sarah maintain an on-again-off-again relationship for a decade, all while he builds his friendship and goes on yearly vacations with another woman. Effectively, Movie Alex emotionally cheats on Sarah for his entire friendship with Movie Poppy. This is a stark contrast from Book Alex, who is single when he meets Book Poppy, and who grows to love and build his life around Book Poppy while believing he can never have more with her, which leads to him exploring his relationship with Book Sarah years after he meets Book Poppy.
The movie further ignores his character and plot points from the novel that were meant to demonstrate his devotion to Poppy (e.g., cleaning up her bedsheets after she wets the bed while extremely ill, getting a vasectomy because the thought of Poppy dying the way his mother did is so terrifying to him, applying to jobs in New York the second Poppy invites him back into her life). These are the types of moments that make romance novels worth reading—they indicate loving someone through the messy, gross, and difficult parts of being alive.
On the surface, the People We Meet on Vacation movie is a perfectly fine romantic comedy with decent side characters, beautiful vacations, and a (frankly unnecessary) Taylor Swift needle drop. Unfortunately, those things aren’t enough to declare that rom-coms are back.
