There are many pop-feminist messages encoded in the new Prime Video romcom The Idea of You, starring Anne Hathaway as Solène, a 40-year-old divorcée, 

and Nicholas Galitzine as Hayes Campbell, the 24-year-old super-famous boyband singer with whom Solène begins a relationship. 

There is the question of age-gaps and ageism, of course – and the stage in a woman’s life when she starts to become “invisible”. 

There is motherhood. There is sexuality and independence. But there is also the idea of women’s happiness. 

“I didn’t know my being happy would piss so many people off,” says Solène towards the end of the film, a line also quoted in the trailer. 

“Did I not tell you?” says her friend Tracy (Annie Mumolo). “People hate happy women.”

This line inadvertently summarises the problems – what should be non-problems – that have plagued Hathaway herself in the last 10 years.

The Idea of You is a film full of romcom clichés and cheesy moments that could easily have tipped into being an eye-rolling, gender-flipped Notting Hill – but somehow it stands up, carried almost exclusively by Hathaway, who brings warmth, humanity and complexity to her character. It’s satisfying evidence of the fact that Hathaway isn’t just an overly sincere theatre kid or a 2000s romcom pin-up – she is, to put it bluntly, a great actor who gives life and soul to her characters.

Anne Hathaway is not an actress who seems eminently hateable. She’s well-behaved, polite, and generally unassuming. She is funny and likeable in 2000s chick flicks The Princess Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada; 

she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as Fantine in the 2013 film of Les Misérables, where she is passionate and moving in a role that’s difficult to fill. Yet just a decade ago she was losing out on roles because of how “toxic” a figure she had become online.

Why did people dislike her so much? It seems that it’s precisely because she was so unobjectionable. Prim, proper and always polite, Hathaway seemed square next to party-girl contemporaries like Lindsay Lohan and demure next to bombshell Scarlett Johansson. She lacked edge, was too wholesome – and, in some criticisms, was actually derided for seeming too happy.

This so-called “Hathahate” became more widespread after that Oscar win in 2013. Hathaway gave a twee acceptance speech that started with a doe-eyed “it came true!”, cementing her fresh-faced, innocent reputation. The consensus was that she was too perfect, too mild, too open. She had a huge white smile that, Sasha Weiss wrote in a 2013 New Yorker piece dedicated to dissecting all her most annoying qualities, was reminiscent of a “nine-year-old girl about to dig into a big slice of birthday cake”. Even with her Fantine pixie cut, she had the air of a woman who could achieve a smooth glossy ponytail in five seconds flat, who got up early and made her own bread and did all the things a woman was supposed to do.

Of course, nothing makes a woman more hateable than doing everything right. Much of the vitriol was straight-up misogyny – there was even a shockingly Victorian-seeming suggestion that Hathaway’s face was simply too thin, a judgement made even more depressing by the rounds of buccal fat removal surgery many celebrities are now having in order to achieve exactly that look. But it also spoke to a broader issue at the time, which was the unmeetable standard of “authenticity” levelled at celebrities (still disproportionately female celebrities). It wasn’t just the jealousy and bitterness of misogyny. It was that if a woman appeared happy – and perfect and warm and innocent – she must be hiding something.

Hathaway told Vanity Fair in March that she was told in the early stages of her career to armour up – to develop both a public and private self to protect her from such feedback – but that she didn’t. It speaks volumes of the knots in which we and the celebrity world tied ourselves that a lack of armour was perceived as inauthentic. But it was – because we needed much clearer signifiers of flaws, packaged as “relatable” traits.

Jennifer Lawrence, who won Best Actress for her role in Silver Linings Playbook the same year that Hathaway won for Les Mis, had these in abundance: on the way to collect her award, she tripped on the hem of her gown in a now infamous “she’s just like us!” moment. She told red carpet reporters how hungry she was and how much she loved pizza. And, for what it’s worth, she also had quite a round face.

Yet the public soon tired of her, too. Within a couple of years, her “authentic” persona was seen as shtick. We were shown with blistering clarity that in a fickle celebrity world, propped up by a concept as slippery as authenticity and imbued with the insidious undertones of misogyny, it was impossible to get it right.

Though her career suffered, and she became an “uncool” actress to cast, Hathaway didn’t waver. She had roles in The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar; she has described director 

Christopher Nolan as an “angel”, not least for putting faith in her when others wouldn’t. Though she has, in the past few years, shown a vulnerability that is still so hankered after – opening up about her fertility struggles and choice to quit drinking – she has never yielded to the self-deprecating irony that seems to reliably but illegitimately give public figures a reputation for unfettered realness.

In 2024, debates rage online about whether Hathaway has had plastic surgery. Last year she spoke out against society’s obsession with ageing, prompting backlash online from people who claim she’s hypocritically had anti-ageing treatments such as Botox and fillers. But there was also speculation in January 2023 that she’d undergone… buccal fat removal surgery, to make her face thinner. If you think it’s impossible to keep up, imagine how she feels.

Anne Hathaway is the perfect case study of how women in the public eye cannot win. But she’s said she’s much happier now, in her 40s – so perhaps she’s also proof that it’s possible not to care. 

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Source: New York Post