“Wish You Were Here” starts out like many a modern fairy tale. Charlotte (Isabelle Fuhrman) has a terrible job with a terrible boss, at the kind of restaurant where she’s forced to wear a stupid uniform and her hair always smells of grease. She lives with her best friend and co-worker, Helen (Gabby Kono-Abdy), and feels aimless. The bleak dating situation isn’t helping, much to the chagrin of her parents (Jennifer Grey and Kelsey Grammer).
Then one night Charlotte meets a stranger named Adam (Mena Massoud) and, after some prodding, goes for a drink with him. She learns he’s an artist, and finds his devil-may-care approach to life appealing. He keeps saying things like “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” and “don’t think so hard” and “life’s short.” As the evening progresses, she’s drawn to him — but by the next day, his personality has changed, and she doesn’t hear from again. Eventually she starts dating a different nice guy (Jimmie Fails) from the apps. But it turns out Adam was harboring a secret, and it will alter the course of her life.
“Wish You Were Here” is the directorial debut of Julia Stiles, who wrote the screenplay with Renée Carlino, the author of the novel on which the movie is based. It’s unabashedly a swoony romance that places Charlotte in the middle of two men who represent two paths for her life.
It’s also — spoiler ahead — working in a long tradition of romances in which two people fall in love, but one partner has a terminal illness, and life together ends before it can really begin. (Think “Love Story,” “Shadowlands,” “A Walk to Remember” and “Me Before You,” among dozens of others.) For some viewers, this is an all too real and resonant plot point, an experience that left them profoundly changed.
But judging from the way it’s deployed in romance novels and films, it also represents something of a fantasy for others who’ve never encountered that tragedy directly. Perhaps there’s something melancholy but appealing about the idea of a passionate romance that speeds up time, leaving one person with only difficult but beautiful memories, instead of the banalities of daily life that accompany a long partnership. It’s the more dramatic equivalent of the romantic comedy tendency to end when the couple gets together, but elide all the stuff that comes next.
To the credit of “Wish You Were Here,” the film acknowledges this fact about Adam and Charlotte’s romance. As her mother says late in the film, “He never had the chance to annoy you. You never had the chance to fight.” With some chagrin, she adds: “I’m sorry you didn’t get that.”
That said, fans of the trope will probably find “Wish You Were Here” appealing. But for me, it took a while to figure out why it doesn’t really work. I’ve found Fuhrman’s performances appealing in the past, particularly in the excellent 2021 drama “The Novice,” in which she plays an obsessive college freshman who joins the rowing team and becomes fixated on a teammate.
She is perfectly fine as Charlotte in this film, transforming from kind of snarky to kind of sweet, but the rest of the film never quite locks into place. The fault seems to be in the chemistry, not just between the leads — it’s tough to believe that Charlotte and Adam have the connection on their night together that the movie insists upon — but between all of the characters. For much of the movie, family and friends trade what’s meant to be witty banter. But something about the rhythm feels off: too many pauses, not enough of the propulsion necessary to make the movie sing.
There’s one other issue that left me cold. Early on, Charlotte insists that “finding some dude on a dating app isn’t going to give me direction in my life.” If you’re well-versed in the rules of the genre, you know this is meant to be dramatic irony. Yet by the end of “Wish You Were Here,” I still wasn’t convinced she’d actually found direction and purpose. I hadn’t been convinced that either she or Adam were as remarkable as they insist the other is. After all, a romance depends on the audience falling in love with the characters, too. Perhaps we just didn’t have enough time together.
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