Regretting You
“Regretting You” is adapted from a novel by Colleen Hoover, who also wrote It Ends With Us. I never saw that hit film, but I have a feeling “Regretting You,” as adapted by writer Susan McMartin and director Josh Boone, will likely not have the same success. Then again, I am not the audience for this movie- they may have a lower threshold for contrived melodrama than I do. This movie didn’t do it for me.
The film starts with a flashback to the senior year of the four friends who will later, as adults, make up the engine of the melodrama to come. There’s sisters Morgan (Allison Williams) and Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), Morgan’s boyfriend Chris (Scott Eastwood), and Jenny’s boyfriend Jonah (Dave Franco). The filmmakers make the decision to go with different hair styling and costume design to make these actors seem younger rather than casting younger actors, and boy does it set a tone for the film. That night, Morgan finds out she is pregnant with Chris’s child. Cut to 17 years later, and they are all gathering for Morgan’s birthday, this time with Jonah and Jenny recently having a baby themselves. The next day, Jenny is returning to work after maternity leave. But that return is cut short by a car accident, which kills Chris and Jenny, who worked together. But, Chris was driving Jenny’s car.
What of Morgan and Chris’s child? She is Clara (McKenna Grace), who is on her way home to the party when she catches a boy from high school, Miller (Mason Thames), at the city limits sign. She stops to give him a ride, but she ends up helping him move it. We find out that she adores Jenny like a friend, and seems to have more respect for Chris, so their passing hits her hard. But Morgan and Jonah- who happens to teach both Clara and Miller in high school- resolve never to tell Clara that Chris and Jenny were having an affair. Meanwhile, she begins spending time with Miller, who has his own hurdles to get over in life.
That’s a lot of plot overview, but the truth is, all of this is basically revealed in the trailer. There’s also another potential plot twist involving the possible parentage of Jenny’s child, but since it goes unresolved, it really could have been excised altogether and the film would have lost nothing from its absence. This movie is supposed to be a sweet, emotional, sometimes lighthearted tearjerker but there was nothing in these performances that made me feel anything emotionally for these characters, which is a shame because all of the main actors have done very good work in other films. The relationship I felt the most emotional connection for was Clara and Miller, and Grace and Thames probably give the strongest performances (outside of Clancy Brown as Miller’s sick grandfather and Sam Morelos as Clara’s comic relief bestie Lexie), but even that has its limits with how obvious the choices they make are. The film also seems to serve as an obvious commercial for AMC theatres, which gets a lot of time onscreen, as that is where Miller works; how they don’t even hide it is one of the wildest choices in a film filled with wild choices. I don’t regret watching “Regretting You,” but I don’t see myself looking at it as a worthwhile life choice, either.
