Given the mad popularity of Colleen Hoover’s novels featuring good-looking adults navigating complicated inter-personal lives, and all the hoo-ha around ‘It Ends With Us’, the first Hoover novel to be filmed, which managed to say something important about domestic violence despite the schmaltz, I had expectations of ‘Regretting You’.
But I should have been warned: just what exactly does ‘regretting you’ mean? In my head, it kept sitting around like ‘Forgetting You’, which is also what this film, based on a Hoover book of the same name, could very easily have been called.
What else do you do when an accident causes not one just but two deaths in a close circle of family and friends, causing devastation all round? When the film opens, we see two happy young couples, Morgan (Allison Williams) and Chris (Scott Eastwood), and Morgan’s younger sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) and Chris’s best friend Jonah (Dave Franco) whooping it up on a double-date at a beach party.
An early scene — Morgan and Jonah wondering how did they ever end up with two people so different from themselves — is a dead giveaway. Chris and Jenny revel in noisy leaping about; Morgan and Jonah prefer not drinking alcohol, and being quiet. Opposites attract, much?
The film then leaps forward a whole seventeen years in time. Jenny and Jonah, proud parents to a newborn, show up at Morgan’s place for a reunion. The latter is now mum to perky teenager Clara (Mckenna Grace) who finds herself mooning over high-school hottie Miller (Mason Thames), with all the attendant anxieties that go with such attractions: will he, won’t he, asks Clara of Jenny, should I, shouldn’t I. The two clearly share a close bond, which feels right between an aunt-and-niece who speak the same language. Stay away, warns the aunt, he has a girlfriend, and you don’t want to be the other woman.
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Ding. Yet another mic-drop, which turns out to have a deeper significance than just dating advice to a novice from an older woman. Turns out that both Clara’s dad and aunt have been hiding things, and when those secrets bubble up to the surface, there is of course, consternation and recrimination, leaving Morgan and Jonah, literally, holding the baby.
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The strong sizzle between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively and the slick production values carried ‘It Ends With Us’, which touched a raw nerve amongst the millions of its mostly-female fans who had undergone abuse at the hands of charming, manipulative men. You feel for her, as much as you want to hate him.
But ‘Forgetting You’ never manages to shake off its TV drama-lite vibe, and despite the natural notes the characters strike amongst themselves — they do feel as if they have lived together for a while —coming off banal, its urgencies fleeting and constructed. There are only some moments which feel vital, making this one of those snackable romances you can graze on, and then forget.
Regretting You movie cast: Allison Williams, Mckenna Grace, Dave Franco, Mason Thames, Willa Fitzgerald, Scott Eastwood
Regretting You movie director: Josh Boone
Regretting You movie rating: 2 stars
