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When a third season of Big Little Lies was confirmed earlier this year, I breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, I thought, Nicole Kidman can be freed from the task of starring as “distressed but well-dressed rich woman with a secret” in endless generic BLL knock-offs! At last, I can get the giddy rush of lusting over stunning Californian property on TV, without having to brave watching Selling Sunset! And phew, Reese Witherspoon can take a break from #girlbossing and get back to delivering snappy one-liners! Little did I realise, though, that before my beloved A-listers return to Monterey, they seem to have set themselves a collective task: starring in schmaltzy romance movies opposite younger leading men.
The latest to take on this nice-work-if-you-can-get-it mantle is Laura Dern. The Oscar winner, 57, who plays formidable CEO and extravagant coat wearer Renata “I will not not be rich!” Klein in Big Little Lies, is currently starring opposite Liam Hemsworth, 34, in the Netflix film Lonely Planet. It’s not an origin story about the guidebooks (though the way the film industry’s going, you’d be forgiven for wondering) – it’s the tale of a reclusive novelist named Katherine (Dern), who travels to a retreat in Morocco in the hope that it will shift her writer’s block.
Amid all the self-regarding authors humble-bragging about their masterworks in progress, she meets Owen (Hemsworth), who has come along as the plus one to a girlfriend that doesn’t seem to “get” him (“He only reads Sports Illustrated!”she scoffs in the trailer). Luckily, Katherine has the perspicacity to see beyond his good-looking exterior; soon they are companionably walking around souks together wearing matching white shirts. An unlikely love story, you’ll be shocked to discover, ensues.
If you’re experiencing a slight sense of deja vu, that might be because back in August, Dern’s fellow BLL alumna Kidman, also 57, appeared in a Netflix movie with a premise that was, shall we say, not entirely dissimilar. In A Family Affair, she played a widowed writer who ends up in a relationship with a young actor, played by actual young actor Zac Efron, 36 (oh, and he’s also her daughter’s boss!). And years before that, in 2017, Witherspoon, then 41, starred in Home Again, playing an interior designer who falls for a much younger aspiring director, played by Pico Alexander, then 26. (The young man moves into her guest house along with two of his friends, who conveniently help Witherspoon’s character self-actualise in various personal and professional ways). Celebrity book clubs, age-gap romcoms: Witherspoon always gets there first.
It’s become like a very specific form of Hollywood jury service: BLL star plays a woman in the creative industries who finds herself when she starts dating outside her usual demographic (ideally, the love interest should have previously appeared in a popular teen franchise and a weepy Nicholas Sparks movie, just like Efron and Hemsworth once did). Which Monterey mom will be next to join this very niche cinematic universe? Zoe Kravitz? Meryl Streep?
Yes, Hollywood loves a formula: none of these storylines are all that far away from Prime Video’s recent hit The Idea of You, an age-gap romance starring Anne Hathaway as a fortysomething gallery owner and Nicholas Galitzine as a twentysomething pop idol who may or may not be based on Harry Styles. And yes, sometimes it feels a bit like these plots may have been generated by AI. But I can’t help but embrace this particular micro-genre, and not just because it makes for perfect, glossy, switch-your-brain-off viewing (or because it’s always a treat to see Kidman wearing an interesting wig, and doing an accent). There’s a sense that films like these are starting to challenge our expectations of older women and their visibility, even if they’re not always doing it in the most nuanced of ways.
Fifteen or even 10 years ago, you could flip the gender of one of the aforementioned movie partnerships, and the age gap probably wouldn’t even be a major plot point. For decades and decades, the film industry has been telling us it’s totally normal for men in their forties and fifties to be chasing after women in their twenties and (let’s face it, early) thirties. Back in 2016, entertainment site Vulture mapped the ages of three successful leading ladies, Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone and Scarlett Johansson, against the ages of their onscreen love interests throughout their careers – and showed just how common it was for these young female performers to be paired up with men two decades their senior.
Redressing that balance – without resorting to tired stereotypes about cougars and milfs – is long overdue. Women over 40 have been pushed aside by Hollywood for so long that there’s something quite joyous in seeing stars like Dern and Kidman, both in their fifties and absolutely at the top of their game, getting the romantic heroine treatment. It’s a sign that the entertainment industry is finally waking up to the fact that women don’t miraculously disappear when they reach middle age, and that they don’t stop desiring and/or being desired at that point either. Yes, watching Dern jaunting around Morocco with a Hemsworth brother is pure escapism, but even if it’s only ever so slightly pushing the boundaries of how women are presented on screen, it’s a tentative step forward. So I’m all for the BLL gang’s ventures – as long as they don’t mess up the filming schedule for season three, of course.
