Regretting You, the latest adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel after last year’s smash success, It Ends With Us, has as one of its overload of subplots the love of cinema as an escape from reality. It’s perfect, actually, because while you’re watching you’ll never feel as if anything real is happening to these people at all. It’s an overwrought and corny drama with soap opera subplots that are unintentionally funny. That the talented cast delivers fully committed performances is the film’s one saving grace, although at the same time, you wish they were all doing something more meaningful.
Behind the camera is Josh Boone, who tackled teenage melodrama convincingly with The Fault In Our Stars and the underrated X-Men film, New Mutants. Boone is a solid filmmaker, but he’s given laughable material to work with here. Martin Scorsese couldn’t save this one unless he injected a healthy dose of mob violence or something. Regretting You begins in flashback to a beachside beer party, where we first meet Morgan (Allison Williams), Jonah (Dave Franco), Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), and Chris (Scott Eastwood). Morgan and Jenny are sisters, but couldn’t be more different. They are coupled up with Jonah and Chris, but it’s obvious within moments that this puzzle doesn’t fit together at all. Morgan and Jonah, both shy introverts, nearly confess their true feelings for one another right then and there, until she reveals her pregnancy. Literal fireworks ensue, folks. Instead, time jumps forward 17 years as Morgan and Chris are long-married, with a teen daughter, Clara (McKenna Grace), who longs to be an actress. Jonah ditched Jenny and skipped town for years, only to return and marry her after getting her pregnant. Drama!!!
Of note is that the actors all play themselves as teenagers. It’s hilariously unconvincing, and they try to hide how old they look by placing objects in front of them. Sorry, Franco, I still see them age lines, homie!!
Because these films can’t exist without tragedy and atomic levels of fallout, a horrible car accident leaves Jonah, Morgan, and Clara grappling with a devastating secret. Morgan is now a single mom to a teen who wants nothing to do with her. And Jonah is a single dad to a newborn he’s unprepared to care for on multiple levels. The adults fall apart immediately and begin indulging in copious amounts of wine, Jolly Ranchers, and Real Housewives marathons. I guess this is what real life is like when nobody seems to have a job, anyway.
Well, let me take that back. There is one person who works. Miller, the town bad boy and “coolest guy in school”, played by How to Train Your Dragon and Black Phone star Mason Thames. We’re told he’s an aspiring filmmaker, although the only evidence is a bunch of posters on his wall and a copy of Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies. He and Clara have a meet-cute by the side of the road, but, he’s got a girlfriend one minute and doesn’t the next, only to be with her again. He’s also got an ailing grandpa, played by Clancy Brown, an actor who dies in EVERYTHING. He and Sean Bean could have a competition over who dies the most on screen. That would be more interesting than this.
Regretting You has way too much going on for a movie that’s so poorly written. Because genuine grief and anxiety are so rarely on display, this is a film that explains its emotions rather than shows them. Or it hits us over the head with tracks by The Killers in hopes they’ll do the trick. This is TV movie level stuff, where every confrontation is volcanic but every resolution gentle as the fallen snow. Williams, Franco, Grace, and Thames all deserve credit for taking it as seriously as they do. Those who have grown up with Grace from her early roles in movies like I, Tonya and Gifted won’t be shocked that she continues to be mature beyond her years. They might also be weirded out to see her in a movie that deals frankly with teenage sex. Yes, we are getting old.
Romance dramas never really fall out of favor, because there’s always a new author whose voice carries the genre for years at a time. Remember when every other one was a Nicholas Sparks adaptation? It wasn’t that long ago. Hoover’s writing bears a lot of the same schmaltzy hallmarks as Sparks, including being set in picturesque North Carolina. But the same goes for all of these authors whose work Hollywood gobbles up for the big screen, and it’s that some of these stories are better than others. Regretting You, hopefully, is as bad as these are going to get because there are a lot of Hoover adaptations on the way. At least this one is bad enough that you’ll be laughing too much to get bored.
Regretting You opens in theaters October 24th from Paramount Pictures.
