Emily Henry, super-popular author of contemporary romance novels with six New York Times bestsellers under her belt, has said that her prepublication jitters always center on one thing: “how the heroine would be received.” In 2023, Henry told New York magazine writer Allison P. Davis that this was a matter of self-image, because the author put some of herself in each heroine: “If people don’t like this thing about her, reject that thing about her, I am probably going to take it too personally.”
Well, I’m so sorry, Emily Henry. I’m sure you’re lovely, and I love that you still live in my state of Ohio—an underrated, if terminally gerrymandered, place to live—and I deeply admire your principled stance against getting on TikTok. But Poppy, the heroine of Henry’s mega-hit 2021 novel People We Meet on Vacation and a newly released Netflix movie based on said novel, is human licorice to me. Poppy is a manic, “fun” person, addicted to hijinks, always turned up to 11. If you’re around Poppy, you’re her permanent audience. I say, as a certified hater of travel mindset: This is just the kind of person who loves to travel!
The book is told completely from Poppy’s point of view, meaning the reader spends a lot of time in her brain, which you may or may not find deeply challenging. Now imagine this kind of heroine on screen, in her full, always-on glory, and you have your buzzy new Netflix film starring Emily Bader and Tom Blyth—one of many recent instances of novels popular with romance readers getting snapped up and adapted (Bridgerton, Heated Rivalry, Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, and Regretting You).
People We Meet on Vacation chronicles the post-college friendship that Poppy (Bader) maintains with Alex (Blyth), a straitlaced guy from her despised Ohio hometown, who has a soft spot for Poppy’s shenanigans. As they’re leaving college and moving to different cities, Alex agrees to go with Poppy on yearly summer trips. These trips are just Alex and Poppy, even if either of them has a girlfriend or boyfriend at the time. Quite often, they stay in the same room, in the name of economy. (Yes, sometimes there is only one bed—classic!) On vacation, Alex becomes a person who doesn’t mind pretending to be newlyweds to get free beignets, drinking what Poppy tipsily terms “too many alcohol,” or scrapping preplanned accommodations to stay overnight in a tent, with no toothbrush. (The horror!) You can guess that eventually, the two of them will work their way inward from their extreme polarities and end up a happy couple.
The adaptation, directed by Brett Haley, is done up in saturated candy colors and will please viewers who crave a lighthearted, straightforward rom-com that won’t run the risk of provoking endless discourse. Tom Blyth is a fine Alex‚ being broad of frame, sincere of face, and able to dance in a passably sexy way in the “fake newlyweds” sequence, during Poppy and Alex’s trip to New Orleans. Emily Bader, who was the lead in the dearly departed Prime historical fantasy romance My Lady Jane, is a sassy, compact brunette—perfect for Poppy, whom Alex calls “tiny fighter.” And we get a nice “the Challengers wind that makes you cheat” first kiss scene, on a street in Tuscany.
Unfortunately, everything that annoyed me about Book Poppy gets so much worse in this movie. Despite the personal antipathy I developed toward this character while reading the novel, Henry is a deft writer, and in her hands, it’s clear that Poppy’s relentless insistence on novelty has a significant underlying uneasiness to it. She grew up with loving parents who were borderline hoarders, felt she couldn’t reveal the texture of her home life to anyone, and was bullied at school. Is her travel bug actually a pathological avoidance of the domestic? Interesting idea!
The movie pulls back from this small amount of darkness, instead extracting the elements of the novel that were clearly inspired by classic rom-coms and making the most of them. In the novel, Poppy is a travel blogger who’s building a social media following, as well as working at a staff magazine job. But in the movie, we get, instead, only the most classic ’90s-throwback rom-com part of her job: a writer for a print travel magazine, complete with a fancy editor with a British accent. There’s a coast-versus-heartland element, too: Poppy wonders whether she should leave her tiny New York apartment and settle down back in her hometown, where her best friend Alex is able to afford a gorgeous stand-alone home—with what looks like four bedrooms!—on a teacher’s salary. (The generational typicality of Poppy’s problems gets named in the novel, where Poppy’s friend Rachel diagnoses her with “millennial ennui.” Poppy asks, “Is that a thing?” and Rachel replies, “Not yet, but if you repeat it three times, there’ll be a Slate think piece on it by tonight.” We see you, Emily Henry!)
Laura Miller
Netflix’s Star-Studded New Mystery Thriller Is Eminently Watchable Trash
Read More
-
This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only
The Avatar Debate That Needs to End
-
Everything That Annoyed Me About a Megapopular Novel Gets Even Worse in Netflix’s Adaptation
-
One of the Most Beloved Shows on Television Is Back, but There’s Still One Thing It’s Missing
The adaptation extracts the most scannably “awkward” elements of Poppy’s character—she’s wearing headphones and singing Robyn’s “Hang With Me” out loud at baggage claim, and she doesn’t realize how loud she’s being! She gets a messy burrito all over Alex’s car!—and does the most with them, which is, for me, too much. Beautiful heroines who spray sink water on their jeans right after meeting cute guys, instigate dances that cause their hosts’ treasured chandeliers to fall, or drop an S-bomb in front of the prime minister are rom-com staples, I know—great ways to soften up the audience and bid them cringe along. (As Tad Friend wrote in his iconic New Yorker profile of Anna Faris back in 2011, the comedic heroine must always fall down, and then sob about it, in order to be made likable.)
Perhaps those who adapted Henry’s novel knew that Poppy could be a tough hang, and so they smoothed her out, making her easier for rom-com frequent flyers to parse. But, watching Netflix’s take, I found myself oddly defensive of the old Poppy—the one that Emily Henry wrote, then worried readers like me wouldn’t like. That Poppy may have been annoying, but at least she was never this predictable.
