No one told me this was supposed to be Shakespeare
Placing Anyone But You in the modern Shakespeare adaptation canon
No one told me this was supposed to be Shakespeare
A few weekends ago, while my partner was out of town on a work trip, I finally got around to watching Anyone But You, the Sydney Sweeney/Glen Powell vehicle that has been heralded by some “critics” (internet commenters) as nothing less than the second coming of the rom com. It wasn’t until well into the first act that I recognized that the film’s flimsy plot was a lazy reconfiguration of Much Ado About Nothing. A very lazy reconfiguration.
The main giveaway was a scene where the supporting characters try to gossip about the romantic leads, intending to be overheard. If the direction of these awkward moments had been more subdued, I might not have noticed even then. The giveaway details were there from the start, but when the romantic leads are introduced as “Ben” and “Bea,” all I could think about was my screenwriting workshop leader’s insistence that you should never give two characters in your script names starting with the same letter. (This was advice I decided to ignore, but I committed it to memory nonetheless.)
The clunky clues are there too, in phrases from the play awkwardly inserted into HomeGoods-style wall art and the like. There’s a running “gag” where someone will deliver a snippet of dialogue from the original play, then tell their companion “I just made that up!” Haha? It just highlights what’s missing from this “interpretation” of an old tale—the wit.
To remain true to the source, Benedict and Beatrice’s flirtation should be defined by witty repartee and insults. The lovers in this film can barely tell each other “I know you are but what am I?” The screenwriters have set the groundwork for a few good arguments—Bea is a law student and Ben some kind of finance bro, it seems—but the jokes sound like first drafts no one ever bothered to revise. The dialogue practically screams [insert joke here]. There’s one particular gag about touching each other’s butts that drags on 10x longer than the geography of a butt could possibly allow, as if the stage directions just read “TKTKTK touch each other’s butts. This should take 15 minutes.” Of course it ends with Bea confusing a live tarantula for a mole on Ben’s butt, because this is comedy and oh did I mention: we’re in Australia for some reason? (Tax breaks for the production, I must assume.) If the movie took us to the play’s location in Italy, it might be imbued with some much-needed old-world charm. Instead, according to the film criticism journal Us Weekly, an American character toasting the family with an “Abbondanza—as we say in our country” is intended to be an “homage to the play’s original Italian setting,” which “leaves the other characters confused but gives a subtle nod to the Bard.” Kill me.
Despite being named the return of the rom com, this movie falls victim to some of the traps I believe were responsible for killing the genre in the first place. This movie is mostly about hot people being hot. In the moments we ought to be getting glimpses into the inner lives of our romantic hero and heroine, the camera is just lingering over them while they flex by the pool. We know Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney are hot. You don’t need to dedicate all this time trying to convince us of an objective truth. I would argue that the best rom coms succeed by showing us hot people in authentic, un-hot moments—that’s where a genuine romance is born. Think Tom Hanks stopping by to visit a sick Meg Ryan in her pajamas. Or think of No Hard Feelings, a better model for the next era of the rom com.
It’s impossible to watch Anyone But You without comparing it to another film in the genre that just celebrated its 25th anniversary—Ten Things I Hate About You. TTIHAY, as we’re going to call it now, has far more fun with the conceit, delivers characters who feel real and therefore more swoon-worthy, and did it all with source material so sexist and outdated you wouldn’t expect to see it staged again anytime soon. Like other Shakespeare updates of the 90’s, TTIHAY smartly moved the action into high school to recreate the social structures and unregulated emotions that would make characters act the way they do in a Shakespeare play. Not only did Anyone But You decline this easy trick to add drama, they took out the drama entirely: Don John is replaced by a perfectly nice ex who does basically nothing to get between the leads. Someone pretends they’re going to call off the wedding, but it’s just a joke. Haha.
I’m all for the return of the romcom and the return of the modern Shakespeare adaptation, but surely we can do better than this.
Recommendations
This piece in The Atlantic on the growing problem of anxiety in dogs.
Chappell Roan’s entire first album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess, and her Tiny Desk concert.
Total eclipses, as a concept. We traveled to Ohio this week to visit family and experience totality. The phenomenon wasn’t overhyped at all!