3 hours ago
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It’s hard to remember now, nearly a year into the legal and reputational slugfest that is Justin Baldoni v Blake Lively, that It Ends With Us, the film at the heart of so much litigious mudslinging – predominantly and relentlessly, it should be noted, by Baldoni’s legal team – was a Hollywood success story.
The first big-screen adaptation of bestselling author Colleen Hoover, an initially self-published romance writer catapulted by BookTok to cult-figure status under the mononym CoHo, successfully elevated what many have dismissed as trauma porn fetishizing abuse into glossy, but effective and emotionally mature, adult theatrical fare. Lively, a Taylor Swift-adjacent style icon (to some) who excels at warm-hearted melodrama, was the perfect anchor for a film targeting what celebrity gossip columnist Elaine Lui termed the “minivan majority” (exurban/suburban, white, middle-class women); the film grossed $350m, against a $25m budget, making it one of the biggest hits of the summer.
The success virtually guaranteed a slate of follow-ups from CoHo’s less popular novels and, indeed, there are two adaptations scheduled for release next year. But judging by Regretting You, the first It Ends With Us follow-up to reach theaters, the CoHo boomlet may be short-lived. Directed by Josh Boone, a veteran of YA romances like John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, from a screenplay by Susan McMartin, perhaps best known as the co-writer of the B-movie Harry Styles fanfic After, Regretting You is a lesson in the intangibles of chemistry – it contains many of the same elements as It Ends With Us (horrific trauma, competing romances, reconnection with a childhood love) with barely any of its groundedness, warmth or ability to mold the soapy source material into coherent substance.
Chemistry is woefully absent between any combination (and the combinations, we soon learn, abound) of sisters Morgan (Allison Williams) and Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) and best friends Chris (Scott Eastwood) and Jonah (Dave Franco), whom we meet as teenagers in faraway relic known as 2006 – unfortunate, as no amount of makeup or lighting contortions can make this cohort of -30-something actors playing 16-year-olds anything but uncanny and distracting. Jonah is with Jenny, but clearly loves Morgan; Morgan is with Chris, who thinks she’s boring because she doesn’t drink, and is also pregnant.
Seventeen years later, Morgan and Chris have a 16-year-old daughter Clara (McKenna Grace) and live in Chris’s childhood home; Jenny and Jonah have an infant, and have just moved home to their quaint small hometown of Davis, North Carolina. CoHo seems to be following the model of famous North Carolinian Nicholas Sparks: secure reputation based on one better-than-expected film carried by phenomenal talent – 2004’s The Notebook, starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams – and proceed with decreasing budgets, star wattage and quality; whereas It Ends With Us looked big-budget, Regretting You has the sheen of streaming.
Things proceed at the same strangely pedestrian, loping pace, whether it be Clara getting a thrill out of an Instagram follow from her crush Miller (Mason Thames) – which, to be fair, feels accurate to teenage life – or Clara attending the funerals of her father and beloved aunt, who summarily die in a car crash, whilst engaged in a clandestine affair. One would think this would drive someone into a grief craze – and, indeed, we do get a satisfying scene of Williams, somehow still an underrated actor, trashing her late cheating husband’s car. But Regretting You seems unsure of its own melodrama, and careens between what should be tear-jerking moments of unfathomable grief and too-cutesy romcom fluff like a teen learning stick-shift. One minute, Morgan is discovering hidden love letters between her sister and late husband; the next, she’s having a playful montage with Jonah. (Franco does, at least, make his yearning for Morgan both palpable and mildly winsome.) At a too-long two hours, Regretting You is at once mild and bumpy, any momentum jolted by basic hits of mourning (sitting on the floor looking at photos) or uninspired romance, mechanical delivery and off-timed humor. (Even Williams, who perfected anxious type-A comedy as Marnie on Girls, feels a little off as a type-A mom with little characterization beyond “likes to design houses”.)
It’s not that one can’t find humor and love and bizarrely contrasting feelings even in the darkest depths of grief. Regretting You almost gets there, when Clara rashly proposes she and Miller finally have sex – there’s otherwise little friction in their coupledom – as an impulsive response to catching her mom with Jonah. The camera settles on Grace’s teary, contorted face as she fumbles for some words to communicate what would one can only imagine is an indescribable surge of rage, grief and lust. For a second, I felt my throat tighten, at the hint of something deeper and darker, more than one flavor at a time. But the moment fizzles quickly, unsustainable in this sterile world. The CoHo movie moment, it seems, could fare the same.
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Regretting You is out in cinemas on 24 October
