Finding You (2021 | USA | 115 minutes | Brian Baugh)
The marketing materials proclaim Finding You to be “the Notting Hill for today’s generation”, and that’s not an inappropriate comparison, at least in terms of its plot. It also owes a debt to Pride and Prejudice, to which it nods within its own runtime. Another movie this one clearly draws from, though, is 10 Things I Hate About You. It’s a different story, and the characters are a couple of years older, but the romantic character dynamics follow that familiar path (initially she denies attraction, he pursues her, eventually their deep connection is unavoidable). And Jedediah Goodacre could not more obviously wish to be filling Heath Ledger’s shoes, with his shoulder-length curly blond mop and aggressively charming demeanor. Rose Reid could easily also be accused of playing Julia Stiles – albeit with a heavy dash of Haley Lu Richardson, so that her attempts at prickly never quite come off as totally convincing against the obvious sweetness of her nature.
With those influences so obviously on its sleeve, Brian Baugh’s wholesome late-teen rom-com (heavy on the “rom”, light and mostly pretty forced on the “com”; based on the YA novel There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones) works from an unsurprisingly by-the-numbers, formulaic story. Finley (Reid) has botched an audition for her dream New York music conservatory, but is apparently already attending some other university that has a study-abroad program, so she jets off to Ireland for a semester to find herself. On the flight over, she encounters Beckett (Goodacre), who immediately tries to charm the pants off of her, but she sees right through his game and is having none of it. Turns out he’s a heartthrob movie star, on his way to shoot the latest installment in his massively popular dragon-themed fantasy series and stuck in a fake-for-the-tabloids relationship with his costar. Will he manage to break through Finley’s annoyed posturing and get her to loosen up and crack a smile? Does Finley ever actually attend a college class? Will we learn why both of these characters are Americans, traveling to Ireland, and just happen to have super Irish names themselves? Some of these questions will be answered!
The cast is composed of actors mostly known for their consistent roles on mid-tier TV shows, plus Vanessa Redgrave (noted octogenarian English actor, here playing Irish). The script starts piling up subplots with secondary characters: a dead brother’s legacy, a strained showbiz-father relationship, a crotchety old lady in a nursing home, a host-family sister with an inexplicable interest in earthworms, a town drunk who turns out to be a gifted fiddler with a thing or two to teach Finley about playing from the heart – so that things really start dragging; this 119-minute film could have easily been 20-30 minutes shorter and been better off for it. Those threads do mostly come together and pay off, but I’m not convinced every single one was necessary to tell this story. Especially a story that still comes off this bland and rote.
It’s no surprise to discover that writer/director Brian Baugh’s previous work all falls into the “inspirational” category – this film isn’t overtly religious like some of his past titles, but its narrative is arguably conservative on a macro level. A young woman is struggling with her academic career and grieving a personal loss, and ends up getting straightened out by the love of a nice young man (and the tutorship of a nice older one), who by the way would much rather be looking at cliffside seascapes with her than partying in sleazy nightclubs. She really has no path to success or personal fulfillment until she’s blessed by this romantic relationship. It’s a story that would have been at home on cinema screens in the middle of the last century, and the pages of romance novels long before that, and has not been meaningfully updated ever since.
But even so, it does manage to tug some heartstrings. Despite myself, after feeling disappointingly flat for the first act or so, I found my stomach dropping a bit thanks to some first-kiss chemistry, and I did want those crazy kids to work it out in the end. The Irish landscape photography is undeniably gorgeous, a visual feast that’s well aware of the heavy lifting it’s doing. I even found myself thinking about it more than twenty-four hours after my screening ended, which is about as high praise as I can give for this type of film.
Finding You is now playing in theaters.