Opulence porn: ‘Anyone But You’ is not the rom-com you’re looking for

In the spirit of those early ’00s Reese Witherspoon comedies and Runaway Bride, Anyone But You is one of those travesties whose makers assume the audience is as stupid as its characters. Like, improbably stupid. Glen Powell as Ben and Sydney Sweeney as Bea star in this nominal take on Much Ado About Nothing: the couple who go through the motions of hating each other while friends conspire for their sakes. These are hot, smart actors. They probably smell nice. Their real-life casual conversations I bet have more zing than the drivel director-cowriter Will Gluck (Peter Rabbit, Friends With Benefits) concocted for them. They can’t even say “fuck” without sounding like they’re reading Keurig instructions.

Like Nathan Hill’s novel Wellness, Anyone But You is very much about The Way We Live Now but crossed with opulence porn. Gluck retrofits the rom-com tropes for a more permissive age whose “social” liberalism is inclusive enough to still require destination weddings and Ina Garten cookbooks. Ben works at Goldman Sachs, no longer requiring IQ tests. Bea may or may not become a lawyer depending on whether she knows the difference between the New York bar and the Bemelmens Bar. An interracial lesbian couple’s wedding in Sydney is the setting. Bea’s sister Halle (Hadley Robinson) and Claudia (Alexandra Shipp), sister of Ben’s best friend Pete (rapper GaTa), inspire their loved ones to jet to a beachside mansion where the breakfast spreads are bounteous and the mountains and forests and koala bears are steps away. No one is allowed to be fat. Anxieties are illegal. The women’s skins gleam. Powell’s biceps are as impossible as a dancing cat. The parents include the stalwart Bryan Brown, the bored Rachel Griffiths, and Dermot Mulroney, whose sour expression suggests a man who remembers co-starring in these things once upon a long ago.

I’ve liked Powell onscreen since his turn in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Want Some!! But there’s a replicant falseness to him too, like he’s cosplaying Matthew McConaughey and George Clooney. Caught explaining to Pete that Bea, after their first night together in NYC, “is a nothing, a disaster” — the lit wick that sparks the narrative — he looks like a guy who would live, in Bea’s words, “on 28 Fuckboy Lane.” Powell has that American guy thing whereby he shows his deepest feelings when keeping his distance from lovers, so when Gluck gives him platitudinous you-complete-me drivel in the last third his facial muscles soften like Play-Doh in August. A game actor in the Emma Stone vein but without the erotic kookiness, Sweeney vacillates between enlivening the proceedings with a vulgar spirit and playing good soldier.

To knock a rom-com with a $220 million gross in this parched era is ungenerous in the Armond White way, but in 2024 surely Hollywood can do better than sell 30-year-old spare parts. Listening to superstar releases by Beyonce and Taylor Swift offends me less than the conspicuousness of the neolib ethos here — did Goldman Sachs and Tourism Australia partially fund this project? Me, I’m a Holiday >>> The Philadelphia Story guy. You can make movies about sexy people in luxurious settings that subvert class expectations. But Anyone But You is the movie Gluck, Powell, and Sweeney wanted to make; they’ve indicated they want to make more. There’s hope they won’t be three more examples of industry fuckboys.

GRADE: C