Lasse Hallström‘s latest film, “The Map That Leads to You,” has the makings of a Gen Z “Before Sunset” meets “Eat Pray Love,” but unfortunately, it also has the depth of a mediocre beach read weepy. That is to say, I enjoyed it as I watched, but it has had no lasting effect on my memory or, even worse, my heart.
Based on a novel by J.P. Monninger, the film centers on the whirlwind romance between recent college grad and soon-to-be banker Heather (Madelyn Cline) and charming vagabond Jack (KJ Apa). The two meet cute on the midnight train going to…Barcelona. They bond immediately after it’s discovered they are both reading Ernest Hemingway’s Spain-set Great American Novel “The Sun Also Rises.”
The mysterious Jack, who hails from New Zealand, allowing Apa the rare opportunity to use his regular accent, gloms along with Heather on her girls trip with her flaky friend Amy (Madison Thompson), who, reeling from a bad breakup, decides to hook up with a swaggering Englishman, and the more serious-minded foodie Connie (Sofia Wylie), who falls hard for Jack’s friend Raef (Orlando Norman). After some misadventures in Spain, including a near sexual assault in Amy’s case, the trio split up to go their own way.
Heather decides to follow Jack on his quest to visit every place his great-grandfather wrote about in his journal while serving as a soldier during World War II. This leads the newly minted couple to Instagrammable sights all across Spain and Portugal, although Jack derides the modern need to photograph everything for the ‘gram. “Be present!” he shouts in the wind. Heather’s insistence that his great-grandfather’s journal is just the olden days version of ‘gramming your way through Europe is pretty laughable, but the movie doesn’t seem to realize it.
This being a weepy, of course, Jack is hiding some terminal illness from Heather, and soon it will come between these young lovers, forcing them apart, and then magically bringing them back together like clockwork. Despite the beautiful cinematography by Spanish DP Elías M. Félix, the film is dragged down by faux-deep conversations about architecture, debates about living in the present versus planning for the future, and numerous other interminable clichés of the genre.
There’s also a rich-kid obliviousness to the whole adventure that is deeply off-putting. In “Before Sunrise,” we are acutely aware that Jesse and Celine are young, dumb, and broke. “Eat Pray Love” goes to great lengths to explain how Julia Roberts’ character can galavant across the globe for a year. Even the older young Americans abroad movies from the classic Hollywood era, like “Rome Adventure” or “Three Coins in the Fountain,” explained how the finances of these trips worked. While there is one half-assed subplot about using stolen money from Amy’s would-be rapist to pay for part of their Spanish sojourn, eventually that money runs out, and yet Heather and Jack are still pulling money out of their ATMs (and we never find out how the other girls are paying their way).
This would be less of an issue if the movie didn’t hit us over the head with the idea that Heather’s single Dad (Josh Lucas, on autopilot) wasn’t some poor schmuck from Texas who has worked “since he was sixteen” and who pulled himself up by his bootstraps so hard through whatever his never-mentioned career is that he was able to send his kid to college out of state (Boston, though they never say which university) and set her up to get a fancy job as a banker in New York City. Also, apparently, she can magically push back the move-in date for her apartment without incurring any extra costs.
Maybe if this vapid movie had anything true or substantial to say about relationships, young adulthood, romance, travel, literally anything about life, if it actually developed its characters beyond rote stereotypes, and if it didn’t use cancer as a shorthand way to make the audience cry, there wouldn’t be room in my brain lingering thoughts about their finances. But alas, when a movie leaves that much empty space with its bland nothingness, that’s what happens. Maybe I forgot to stay present.
