It’s Right There in the Title
Want a little YA anti-sizzle mixed in with your domestic melodrama? Have we got one for you.
Regretting You
Director: Josh Boone • Writer: Susan McMartin, based on the book by Colleen Hoover
Starring: Allison Williams, Dave Franco, Mckenna Grace, Mason Thames
USA / Germany • 1hr 56mins
Opens Hong Kong October 23 • IIB
Grade: D
Regretting You may just be the whitest movie of the year. And not just because it has a whole mess of wypipo in it. Regretting You smacks of the kind of eye-rolling oblivious whiteness everyone else points and laughs at that the really white folks don’t see the comedy (or infuriating cluelessness) in. In this “film”, Morgan and Chris Grant (M3GAN’s Allison Williams and Scott Eastwood, the bruh that Hollywood is still trying to make happen because Eastwood) are a two-car, way way upper-middle class couple with a 16-year-old daughter, Clara (Mckenna Grace from the Ghostbusters reboots), replete with loose Blake Lively-style blonde waves – that fucking hair, you know what I mean. Morgan got pregnant in high school, and as reality dictates, girls who get knocked up in high school usually end up in sprawling, family bungalows on hectares of land. The Grants live in the small town (because it’s always a non-evil small town) of Dylan, population 60% of Mongkok, in one of the Carolinas or something, and regularly brunch with Morgan’s sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald, Strange Darling) and her sudden fiancé Jonah (Dave Franco, sleepwalking), and their adorable baby. The four have been friends since forever, long enough to de-age actors between 34 and 40 in flashbacks. This sunny life is shattered when Jenny and Chris both die in the same car wreck, and force Morgan and Jonah to confront the awkward truth that they were being soap operaed, the feelings they’ve harboured for each other since their teens, and Morgan and Clara to address their entirely idiotic relationship.
This movie is blinding
Regretting You is based on yet another book by Colleen Hoover, the discount Nicholas Sparks who foisted the dreck that was It Ends With Us upon us. It’s one of those tone deaf tragedies with a baked-in pat happy ending, with characters called Lowen Ashleigh, Kenna Rowan, Ledger Ward and Ryle Kincaid. This film is just the latest adaptation of Hoover’s singular (and enormously popular) brand of romance, soon to be joined by Reminders of Him and Verity. In a genius stroke of material and director in sync, Josh Boone is on hand to flatten out the Hallmark Channel-ready images that ensure we see the Holy Bible in the hand of a minister, I guess, at the hospital when Morgan and Jonah get the devastaing news. Just as well, though. Now that douche-bruh Chris – who says at one point, in words, that his “favourite Morgan is drunk Morgan” (!) – and party girl Jenny are dead, they can bone down. It’s okay. It’s true love. The boring ones belong together.
Boone’s last film was the messy The New Mutants, but he’s really tapping the more treacly aspects of his The Fault in Our Stars this time around, and laying the saccharine, juvenile romance on to a viscous level. The YA of it all floats to the surface in what is actually the A plot, about Clara, her aspirations to drama school and her dicking around with potential boyfriend Miller (Mason Thames, Black Phone 2), the “bad boy” who works at AMC (trust me, they want you to know it’s an AMC) and lives with his cancer-stricken grandfather Hank (Clancy Brown, and how dare they subject Clancy Brown to this). Though Clara is an entitled little sack most of the time, you can tell she’s a good girl because when she wants to “get out of her head” after her father’s funeral, she asks Miller to score her some weed. And oh my goodness, but the devil’s lettuce doesn’t sit well with her wholesome self! Miller is a source of friction for Morgan and Clara, though none of Williams, Grace or scriptwriter Susan McMartin (writer of The Help-lite, Mr Church) can make these women feel real. They’re schmaltzy fantasies of how genteel ladies deal with first world problems. All that’s missing is a Mint Julep and a fan, though Morgan has a few scenes on the sofa with a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.
For nearly two hours we have to suffer Morgan and Clara processing their grief, and in Clara’s case getting several brutal wake-up calls about her precious life. In the end we get nothing for our time. Regretting You brings zilch to the table as far as interrogating agency and autonomy, even as it flirts with Morgan’s reconciliation of her entire life being reduced to wife and mother. Her big moment of self-determination comes in … redesigning the living room. And that’s the problem with Regretting You. The maudlin melodrama isn’t for me, but lots of us out there like a good weepy romance. That’s cool. But the retrograde ideas of beauty, behaviour, family, community and moral absolutism are for shit and that’s what makes Regretting You unbearable. There’s a grand total of three non-white people in Dylan – in a Carolina. Huh? Lexie and Efren (Sam Morelos and Ethan Costanilla) are the brown BFFs to Clara and Miller respectively (see how progressive these kids are?) and so of course they’re going to get hooked up romantically. The third POC is the Baptist pastor. He’s Black, natch. Fuck you, movie.
Franco turns in a non-performance, but Williams manages a couple of funny moments when she decides to make an effort (her stare down at Miller is amusing), and when the brown folks get a minute they prove to have the most personality, Morelos in particular. But Grace, who’s been fine in the past, is simply a grinning, insufferable twit who swaps out showing her gums and batting her fake lashes for acting. It’s a symptom of how everything about Regretting You is out of touch and off the mark, and can’t even be bothered to respect is core audience. At least there’s no litigation attached to it. But for that to happen, everyone involved would have to give a shit.