‘Regretting You’ Review: Young Stars Can’t Save a Flaccid Tale of Flimsy Parallel Romances from the Resident Queen of BookTok [D+]
When is romance not actually romantic? This seems to be the question that BookTok Queen Colleen Hoover is most intent on exploring, at least on the basis of the cinematic adaptations of her work. It Ends With Us, last year’s adaptation of her most popular novel, followed Blake Lively’s improbably-named florist Lily Blossom Bloom as she grew to understand that the love of her life was just an abusive piece of shit. That film thought it was doing something challenging and worthwhile by calling out how many of our favorite tropes from romance novels and films are actually abusive and borderline sociopathic, but it still wanted viewers to swoon, leading to an imbalanced, confused mess. The latest adaptation of Hoover’s work, Regretting You, goes several steps farther: Not only are there now two romances happening in parallel, but the main one is between two long-time friends who discover that their respective spouses have been cheating on them with each other for years. There’s probably a sexy, even romantic, film to be made out of that premise (Wong Kar-Wai’s In The Mood for Love had a similar premise, and that’s one of the most beautiful films ever made about romantic longing), and certainly a bold, uncomfortable one. Unfortunately, this film, as adapted by Susan McMartin (After) and directed by Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars), doesn’t have the balls to be anything but laughable.
The film begins in the mid-aughts with the sound of the local radio station playing that latest big hit, “When You Were Young” by The Killers (if you think that song choice is embarrassingly on the nose, just wait). The quartet of high schoolers in the car listening to the radio consists of sisters Morgan (Allison Williams) and Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) and their respective boyfriends, Chris (Scott Eastwood) and Jonah (Dave Franco). You’d be forgiven for thinking that they were paired in the opposite way, since, as Jonah says to Morgan, they both ended up with their exact opposites; Morgan and Jonah are similarly reserved while Jenny and Chris are more outgoing. Morgan recognizes the longing beneath Jonah’s words but can’t bring herself to betray Chris. However, given that she sneaks into a gas station bathroom with a shoplifted pregnancy test like the daughter in a Lifetime Original Movie, she clearly has other things on her mind.
Seventeen years later, Morgan and Chris are married and living in his childhood home with their teenage daughter, Clara (Mckenna Grace), and Jenny and Jonah have just had a baby of their own and are going to get married themselves. Everyone seems happy, except for Jonah and Morgan. She doesn’t like that after high school he unceremoniously broke up with Jenny and left them all, only getting back together with her at his father’s funeral, which resulted in their little miracle. He, meanwhile, still carries a torch for Morgan, which only burns brighter after they learn that Chris and Jenny were having an affair in the worst way possible: Being told at the hospital by a doctor and a priest that they died together in a car crash when they were both supposed to be working. That this scene, with its heavy use of slow motion, copious amount of tears, and overblown score, somehow isn’t the most melodramatic in the film should give you an idea of what you’re in for from here on out, especially since we haven’t gotten to Clara. The deaths of her father and aunt cause Clara to rebel with her new boyfriend Miller (Mason Thames) in ways that Morgan is not prepared for, especially since she has to constantly lie in order to preserve her daughter’s positive feelings towards Chris and Jenny. How long can Morgan keep Clara in the dark, especially given her own complicated feelings about the situation?
If that sounds like a whole lot of mess for one movie, well, it is. This is a melodrama, after all, and what would a good melodrama be without a plot overly stuffed with closely-guarded secrets, deep-seated yearning, familial conflict, intergenerational misunderstandings, messy sex, and the dismantling of social mores in the name of true love? The only thing Regretting You is missing is a good case of amnesia, but perhaps that’s on the audience to provide for themselves, considering the amounts of liquor needed to survive this film. You could play several different drinking games with this – drink every time Morgan uses her phone to track Clara! Drink every time Dave Franco tries to stare soulfully at Allison Williams! Drink every time there’s a reference to another film released by Paramount! – but it’s not necessary. By the third time one of the actors lifelessly reads an onscreen text message in voiceover, you’ll want to be drunk. By the time one of those text messages is the world’s most awkward use of the thumbs-up emoji, you’ll wish you were blacked-out.
Despite being one of the most popular genres in all fiction, melodrama has gotten a bad reputation over the decades because of examples like Regretting You; lazily-written romances that simultaneously exaggerate and flatten real emotions so much that they become unrecognizable. Melodrama actually has a long history of reflecting a mirror on society by calling out its many hypocrisies, but if Regretting You is attempting to do that, then its message is hopelessly muddled. To the film’s credit, it does manage to flip some tropes around in nicely unexpected ways that make the film more entertainingly messy. Most notable of these is when Miller calls out Clara for giving him a booty call when she’s clearly not ready to lose her virginity. Not only is it refreshing to see a young man say no to sex because he believes it should be special (but not so special that they have to be married before they do it), but it’s the one scene in the film that allows the characters to really grapple with their messy, complicated emotions in a way that feels genuine, if misguided. Granted, the film doesn’t let the characters grapple with their emotions very often because if they did, then the audience would have to follow suit, and there are some supposedly romantic revelations in the film’s final act that many would not find romantic at all if the film got them in the habit of interrogating the characters’ actions.
While Morgan in particular wallows in her sorry fate, she doesn’t spend much time thinking about her husband and sister’s affair and what it actually meant. She and Jonah find Chris’s secret stash of love letters from Jenny, but never open them, leaving the entire context of their affair a mystery. Williams’s brittle sense of composure fits the role perfectly; Morgan laments that while raising a child so young she didn’t have time to think about her dreams, and now she’s stuck in her cheating husband’s childhood home, where his presence can be felt in every nook and cranny. She’s surrounded by reminders of Chris and his betrayal, and thus the fact that she didn’t betray him when she had the opportunity. The unspoken questions about the man she thought she knew all play out on Williams’s face, but the script never allows for so much as a moment of introspection for either Morgan or Jonah, except as regards their own relationship in the wake of Chris and Jenny’s deaths. In order for a romance between these two people to work, the actors playing Morgan and Jonah must have world-meltingly hot chemistry, something Williams and Franco only come close to once, in a mid-film flashback that takes place in a pool. But even then, the film undercuts itself by positing the longing between Morgan and Jonah as pure and that between Jenny and Chris as vile, solely because the latter actually acted on it, without giving us any insight into how or why their affair actually began. It’s fine to simply label them as cheaters and move on, but Morgan and Jonah obsess over the affair without ever asking what it says about them, leaving a gaping hole in their characters that neither Williams nor Franco are capable of filling on their own.
As for the young couple, at least Grace and Thames have believable chemistry. While their relationship is generally handled with a degree of sensitivity missing elsewhere in the film, the plotting of the storyline is just as unbelievable as that for the adults. Miller breaks up and gets back together with an unseen girlfriend what feels like a dozen times in the film’s first act, leaving Clara confused and turning to her aunt for advice. The last words Jenny texted her were, “You do not want to be the other girl. TRUST ME.” Since she never replied to Clara’s follow-up questions, she believes that she caused the accident that killed Jenny and her father. Grace does admirable work navigating Clara’s complex emotional state, giving a more layered, believable performance than any of the adults in the film (except the great Clancy Brown, who shows up for three brief scenes as Miller’s grandpa to give the film the kind of class it could use a whole lot more of). Thames has to play an impossible character, and he can’t save the film’s ridiculous “happy” ending from itself, but he’s loose and charismatic enough that he works as a romantic lead, which is far more than can be said for the wooden Franco. Together, Grace and Thames are good enough that it’s hard to not wish the film was solely focused on them, despite their scenes together hitting the same exact beats over and over.
If Grace and Thames are the only genuinely good things about Regretting You, then at least the film has so many baffling details that it very nearly lands in so-bad-it’s-good territory. Wannabe filmmaker Miller’s job at the local multiplex turns the film into an ad for AMC Theaters for a good five minutes (hey, anyone else suddenly feeling the need to see The Running Man?), and among the many movie posters lining the walls of his bedroom is that teenage boy classic, The Two Jakes. The film also has a surprisingly strong sense of humor and decent sense of pacing. In the end, though, this is a film that borrows one of its last plot points from Burlesque, of all things. Regretting You could never hope to reach that film’s camp heights, but it comes much closer than a film about such an emotionally thorny situation should.
Grade: D+
Paramount Pictures will release Regretting You only in theaters on October 24.
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