It’s hard to imagine watching “Regretting You” alone. The movie, a cross-generational romantic melodrama, is built for a crowd, where viewers can cackle together. In my screening, I’m not sure what got the bigger laugh: the scene in which the teenage dreamboat, Miller (Mason Thames), tries to wipe smudged liquid eyeliner off the immaculately coifed Clara (Mckenna Grace); or when Clara stops a wholly demure movie theater make-out session to announce to him that she is a virgin.
Directed by Josh Boone (“The Fault in Our Stars”) and adapted from Colleen Hoover’s best seller, the movie follows a mother and a daughter who are recovering from a family tragedy while looking for love in all the right places. It’s formulaic and predictable, with goofy writing and clumsy editing. The saving grace is the actors, who manage to perform even the most ridiculous lines with a straight face.
Leading the charge is Allison Williams, who brings her nasally deadpan and type-A severity to the role of Morgan Grant, Clara’s overbearing mother. Morgan had Clara as a teenager, when she got unexpectedly pregnant by her boyfriend, Chris (Scott Eastwood). A hunky party boy, Chris was all wrong for her, but they married anyway and moved into his family home. Many years later, Morgan’s little sister, Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), had a baby after a one-night stand with Jonah (Dave Franco), an old high school flame whom she now plans to marry.
The complexities of this back story are conveyed at a bafflingly high speed, in a brief overture set in 2007 followed by a torrent of present-day expository dialogue. But before we can disentangle the knotty social dynamics, a car accident shakes up the family, leaving Morgan, Clara and Jonah grieving and wondering whether Jenny and Chris were who they said they were.
“Regretting You” takes place in Dylan, N.C., a fictional small town with picturesque farmhouses and picket fences. In addition to the two adult couples, Dylan’s visible residents include Clara, an aspiring actress, and Miller, whose tousled mop and flirty grin bring the story into young adult territory. Grandparents, neighbors, pals outside of the crew — they’re outside the scope of this movie’s fantasy of domestic life and strife, and therefore invisible.
That fantasy is also a conservative one. Although unplanned pregnancy plays a major role in “Regretting You,” pregnancy is never framed as a decision to be made, but rather as a life disrupter that compels women to couple up and settle down. The movie understands that Morgan is constrained by her circumstances; one of the items on her vision board reads, “Find your passion.” But Morgan’s eventual epiphany is not that she should break free from her cage, but instead dress it up to look prettier inside.
As the parallel mom-and-daughter love stories play out to their inevitable conclusions, even the movie’s unintentionally comedic moments can’t freshen the stale core.
Regretting You
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters.
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