“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.
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