So you’re Julia Stiles and you decide to have a crack at directing a feature film. Wish You Were Here is the result, and, well well, if it isn’t a mash-up of precisely the sort of films Stiles used to star in when she was starting out, rom-com, girl-next-door, travails-of-the-teen-spirit-y kind of stuff – Ten Things I Hate about You most notably.
She also wrote Wish You Were Here so this choice is clearly deliberate. Possibly Stiles is laying ghosts to rest or laughing at herself, it’s hard to say. What is clear is that her film is a mess until it properly works out which of the various early-Stiles-adjacent genres it really wants to go for.
Until then a bit of rom-com and a bit of out-and-out romance until the terminal-illness weepie is revealed once the gloves come off, if terminal-illness weepies wear gloves.
But first there’s phases one and two to sit through. It’s only when a life-threatening tumour comes along as a significant player that things get emotionally weighty.
Up till then there’s been a real in-the-movies aspect to the story of a waitress called Charlotte (Isabelle Fuhrman) and a hipster called Adam (Mena Massoud) meeting and spending a wild night together of bantering repartee, staring into each other’s eyes and indulging in ker-ay-zee behaviour – a bit of late-night graffiti-ing. They’ve fallen instantly in love is the idea.
But the banter is lame, the chemistry between Fuhrman and Massoud not entirely there and the graffiti-ing is kind of tasteful – they’re not actually defacing property because artist Adam has first flyposted the wall they’re going to tag with blank paper. Did someone focus-group that decision? It feels a bit fragrant.
A takedown might be the vague intention. Or a misunderstanding of how hard these things are to do well. Wish You Were Here often feels as if it thinks a stating of the basic boy-meets-girl structure is enough to get it over the line, and after that the blanks can be filled in any old how with bits from 1990s romances and rom-coms.
Like the shadow relationship that always features in these things. It usually features two secondary characters on the same arc as the main ones, except theirs is a larkier, or uglier one.
Here, Helen and Roddy cosplay the main event. Helen is Charlotte’s room mate and confidante, and is played by the likeable Gabby Kono-Abdy. Roddy is a placeholder character so thin that naming Josh Carras as the actor playing him feels unfair. As for the excellent Jimmie Fails, as Seth, the nice guy who steps up when Adam gets ill but is not going to get what he wants (Charlotte), he does what he can with a role that is almost dismissively rote.
Stiles has also managed to get Kelsey Grammer and Jennifer Grey in to star as Charlotte’s parents. They’re both underused, though Grammer so underused it wouldn’t have made any difference at all to the film if he just hadn’t shown up.
If it all sounds entirely hateful, it isn’t. Because once Stiles has got her ducks in a row, her film starts to fall into shape, and Fuhrman – who is so great in The Novice that she is in the “can do no wrong” category possibly for ever – gets something to sink her teeth into.
If you’ve seen the film Love Story you’ve seen all of these things, or A Walk to Remember or The Fault in Our Stars, or the books of John Green or Nicholas Sparks. When done well they are affirmatory and joyous – between the tears. Wish You Were Here is not done well, because it starts off in the wrong direction. But it gets there in the end. Skin of the teeth.
Wish You Were Here – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
