Anne Hathaway – sober, sexually strong and no longer pleasing to others

Editor’s note: Holly Thomas is a London-based writer and editor. She is the morning editor at Katie Couric Media. She tweets @HolstaT. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. view more opinion on CNN.

It feels strange to start a complimentary article about Anne Hathaway by saying I didn’t particularly like her latest film, but here it is.

“The Idea of ​​You” isn’t bad, it’s just not my thing. Hathaway’s character Solène Marchand turns 40. She has “built a community around art and inclusion,” as a guest at her birthday party helpfully notes. She has perfect hair. She throws unread books aside without feeling guilty. She accidentally breaks into pop star Hayes Campbell’s (Nicholas Galitzine) trailer to go to the bathroom, but within seconds of meeting him he’s blown away. Apparently I can’t stand watching good things happen to good people.

Fortunately, Hathaway doesn’t need me to like her films. She’s an Oscar-winning actress who, aside from her quavering Yorkshire accent in 2011’s “One Day,” has been delivering near-flawless performances for more than two decades. Her portrayal of a woman with bipolar disorder in the Amazon series Modern Love is exquisite. She is consistently charming in interviews and stunning on red carpets. She moves the cultural needle regarding sobriety and women’s sexual power. She doesn’t have to prove anything anymore.

But as she recently explained to the New York Times, she has spent far too much of her life trying to make other people happy.

Picking up a terse line from “The Idea of ​​You,” the Times interviewer asked Hathaway if, like Solène, she was a “people pleaser.” “I think I’m a former man-eater,” she replied. A few conversations later, she added: “When I notice the old instincts coming back, I just tell myself: You won’t die stressed.”

It’s good advice. For much of her career, Hathaway has been dogged by caustic, irritatingly vague accusations that she’s unlikable that had little to do with what she actually does. The response to her 2013 Best Supporting Actress Oscar win for “Les Miserables” was intense. Critics derided her as an overzealous “theater child,” and New York Magazine wondered, “Why do women hate Anne Hathaway?” The term “Hathahate” was coined to mark this moment. A Google search for “Hate Anne Hathaway” already returns more than five million hits.

Thousands of words could be written (and have been written) about why someone who is harmless at worst and phenomenally impressive at best has inspired so much disgust. It’s not just Hathaway. A similar version of the same fate has befallen many famous women (worth noting: no one cares about how “likeable” Jake Gyllenhaal or Leonardo DiCaprio are). Jennifer Lawrence was hilarious and likeable until she stumbled too often in public. Jameela Jamil was a feminist hero until she was deemed too great to authentically advocate for less Photoshop in magazines. The public is like Goldilocks and can whine when it senses “too much” of a good thing. Hathaway has learned that there is little point in bending to his whims.

This is where reality meshes with “The Idea of ​​You.” There’s an almost unbearably vulnerable scene in which Solène admits that when she found out her ex-husband was having an affair, she tried to remedy the situation by suggesting they forget about it. Solène’s husband didn’t want to and they separated. It’s excruciating, but the message is exactly right. Pleasing people is like throwing darts while blindfolded. You can’t know what makes another person happy, and even if you guess correctly, it’s almost certainly not in your power to make them happy.

The film takes place years after this betrayal, and Solène, like Hathaway, has overcome her people-pleasing habit. But that’s only half the battle. Once you stop defining yourself based on other people’s expectations, you’re left with a lot of empty space. It’s difficult to build self-awareness if you’re not used to listening to your own voice, and paying too much attention to other people’s voices will almost certainly be an unhelpful distraction. Therefore Hathaway should completely ignore what I’m about to say.

Hathaway is so radiantly beautiful in “The Idea of ​​You” that it undermines the entire film, at least for me. The film’s central conceit is that love is strong enough to bridge the gap between generations, wealth and money. As viewers, our job is to suspend disbelief at the extremely unlikely notion of a suburban mom winning the heart of a young superstar. The fantasy is the point.

Unfortunately, there is nothing less boundary-crossing than two exceptionally attractive people falling in love. As soon as they met on screen, I thought, “Sure,” and the back-and-forth that followed felt like a waste of time. How could two people who look like that not get together? The film offers many understandable reasons why Solène’s confidence might be damaged by her divorce and why she might have a hard time accepting Hayes’ attraction to her. But I couldn’t buy any of them because she’s so hot. And apparently I’m so superficial.

As embarrassing as this admission is, it at least illustrates the tension that led to so much head-scratching over Hathaway in the 2010s. So much time and ink was wasted on the puzzle, which made it so annoying even though it was never the problem. She was a good actress doing good work, and the audience’s collective inability to cope was completely beyond her control. Likewise, my inability to see beyond Solène’s beauty what might be going on in her brain has nothing to do with the quality of Hathaway’s acting. It’s an ego problem. Like anyone else, it was always a waste of time to please her people.

A meme I came across recently comes to mind: “Oh, so you’re a people pleaser? Name three people who are happy with you.”

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