The Perfect Date (2019)

A teenage boy rents himself out as a stand-in boyfriend to finance his college dreams, and the resulting enterprise is less a commentary on transactional romance than a pitch deck for a service nobody requested. The Perfect Date arrives from Netflix with the polished blandness of a catalog item, and it knows precisely what it is. Noah Centineo plays Brooks with the affability of a labrador, and the young cast surrounding him includes Latino leads in roles that require no explanation and receive none. The diversity of the ensemble is simply the weather of contemporary teen casting, unremarked and unthemed. There is no racial consciousness here at all, no gesture toward one, and no apparent appetite to manufacture any.

The film does nurse a faint class grievance. Brooks hails from working-class Bridgeport and lies about being from well-heeled Darien, and Shelby, the wealthy girl he pursues, treats the deception as a betrayal of pedigree. It is a thread, not a thesis. The screenplay pulls the sting well before the third act, converting structural inequality into a private lesson about honesty. Celia, the rich girl complicit in the fake boyfriend arrangement, gets a few worthwhile moments of refusal, notably declining to serve as anyone's backup. She is granted agency, though the engine remains a boy's self-discovery, so the arrangement tilts conventional.

Everything concludes with a letter, in which Brooks confesses that wanting the nicest car and the best school made him a bad friend and an ungrateful son. It is a moral, delivered softly, almost apologetically, and it lands with the weight of a greeting card. The Perfect Date is warm, brief, and entirely frictionless. It exhibits a mild social awareness, a mild class sensitivity, and a mild quantity of everything else. Mildness, in the end, is the governing aesthetic.