The Idea of Them: Anne Hathaway and Ryan Gosling, Millennial Movie Stars

At the moment, the emergence of a movie like The Fall Guy or The Idea of You, largely dependent on star turns from the likes of Ryan Gosling or Anne Hathaway, is often positioned as oppositional to the Disney franchise machine that values recycled brands over whatever star power actors are able to add to them. Yet many of these stars – Hathaway and Gosling are just two; Zendaya, whose Challengers is currently flying the flag for smartly adult-targeted entertainment, is another – do originate from that Disney machine. Gosling got his start on the Mickey Mouse Club revival, logging his time the same season as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake; Hathaway got hers a little later, starring in The Princess Diaries and its sequel. It’s one of several ways they have both come to seem like our most quintessentially millennial movie stars, both in terms of their birth and when they became famous.
Like kids born to prosperous boomer parents, Gosling and Hathaway had a major leg up from their early association with Disney (and, as with boomers, something that looked more sinister in retrospect). At the same time, neither of them were quite famous enough as official or symbolic Mouseketeers that they needed to declare independence with quite so much insistence as some of their peers. (Yes, Hathaway did a risqué movie called Havoc early on, but as far as anyone could tell, it was released directly to Mr. Skin dot com.) That grounded sensibility is reflected in both The Idea of You and The Fall Guy, which have their megawatt stars playing characters who wind up fame-adjacent, a presentation not uncommon for vehicles that want to acknowledge the otherworldliness of their stars without quite indulging them. Gosling’s Colt Seavers is a stunt double for a preening, globally famous actor played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, something of an in-joke given that Gosling is more of a household name than the guy he’s supposed to be interchangeable with (or maybe a different sort of in-joke predicated on the idea that even the most popular of today’s stars aren’t as distinctive as bigger figures from Hollywood’s past). Hathaway’s Solène is even further removed from the spotlight, until she’s thrust further into it as the older girlfriend of a beloved pop star.
Their roles both have connections to past and relatively lesser-seen vehicles, as if reprising them for the masses: Ryan Gosling is essentially playing his goofball detective from The Nice Guys, only with somewhat less bumbling physicality, while Anne Hathaway is kinda-sorta remaking an indie project hardly anyone saw called Song One, where her character is also introduced to a musician beloved by someone else in her family (in this case her comatose brother rather than her ex-boyband-fan daughter) and also becomes smitten with his sensitive-musician stylings.
Song One is part of an unofficial 2010s-era series where Hathaway plays (implicitly millennial) women who are Going Through Some Shit, also including the Parkinson’s sufferer in Love & Other Drugs and the alcoholic screw-up of Colossal. The pivot here was less from her Disney Princess status than from the path laid out for her by The Devil Wears Prada, which appeared to lead more toward chick-lit pictures like Bride Wars. Hathaway comes across like a rom-com lead – wholesome smile, Type A precision – but hasn’t actually starred in that many, with Prada and Bride Wars (and her Jane Austen not-exactly biopic Becoming Jane, and her later Nancy Meyers-directed vehicle The Intern) focusing on career and friendships more than traditional romance, mirroring a generational shift in younger city-dwellers. When Hathaway has dabbled in romance, it tends to be more bittersweet, which makes The Idea of You feel like a reconciliation between Hathaway’s rom-com-ready neatness and the disarray of her more daring roles.
That’s in the text of the movie, too, with Solène positioned as a successful gallery owner whose romantic life hasn’t turned out quite as planned, with an early pregnancy and a divorce caused by her husband’s infidelity. Theoretically, it should be a striking balance between Hathaway’s buttoned-up early work, where she often felt as if she was hitting her mark so precisely that her performances had no sense of spontaneity, and the paradoxical relaxation she seemed to feel playing messier women. There’s even a turn where Solène experiences a barrage of vile online comments and unfounded bad press over her new relationship, an aspect of the movie Hathaway could surely relate to, having been on the receiving end of a press-cooked narrative that people hated her try-hard theater-kid smarm (even though that wave of cruelty crested long after she had loosened up on screen; her Les Misérables Oscar came not long after her delightful turn in The Dark Knight Rises).
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