Regretting You: A Review

REGRETTING YOU

When my family wanted to watch Regretting You, we could not remember the title. We had an idea about its plot. This is why we kept referring to Regretting You as "the adultery movie". Regretting You is not as bad as I was led to believe. It is not particularly good. It is serviceable.

Sisters Morgan (Allison Williams) and Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) have a tight bond in high school. Morgan also has a tight bond with Jenny's boyfriend Jonah (Dave Franco). It is painfully obvious to any outsider that Jonah is deeply in love with Morgan. It is painfully obvious that Morgan and Jenny are oblivious to the obvious. Morgan does not have much time to ponder much, as she confides to Jonah that her boyfriend Chris (Scott Eastwood) just knocked her up.

We move up seventeen years. Chris and Morgan are raising their daughter Clara (McKenna Grace). Jonah has recently returned to their hometown, reconnected with Jenny and now are in a state of permanent engagement. They also share a child, Elijah. Clara delights in this tightknit group of adults, with Jonah being a teacher at her high school. She also delights in Miller (Mason Thames), the not-so-bad-boy she spies moving a city limits sign while on her way to her mother's birthday party. Miller is moving the sign so that his favorite pizza parlor can deliver to his rural home, as they do not deliver outside the city limits.

Clara is very close to Aunt Jenny, so much so that she confides to her that she finds Miller attractive despite him having a girlfriend. However, tragedy hits our foursome when Chris and Jenny are killed in a car accident. Clara never asks why her father and aunt were together when they died. She also angrily wonders why her mother Morgan did not give Jenny and Chris a joint funeral. In her grief, she turns to Miller, who has dumped his girlfriend. 

Morgan and Jonah do not wonder why Jenny and Chris were together at death. It soon becomes clear: Jenny and Chris were having an affair. The repercussions of both their liaison and their deaths go on throughout Regretting You. Jonah temporarily abandons Elijah, convinced that Chris is the biological father. Clara plays hot and cold with Miller, using him to get back at Morgan for her apparent lack of grief. This cold war continues as Morgan eagerly looks to go to college outside her hometown. Eventually, our two couples realize how much they do love each other. There is reconciliation, peace and a surprising amount of wealth thanks to Miller's grandfather (Clancy Brown) and his air rights.

"Where do I begin, to tell the story of how great a love can be?". This is the opening line to (Where Do I Begin?) Love Story, the theme song from the film Love Story. In a similar vein, I can ask, "Where do I begin, to tell how dumb the film Regretting You can be?". 

Regretting You relies on much stupidity from the characters. Morgan and Jonah are clearly attracted to each other right from the beginning. In fact, I initially thought while watching that Jonah had knocked Morgan up and she just thought that Chris was the father. For most of the film, I expected Clara to discover that Jonah and not Chris was her biological father. I was genuinely surprised when it turned out not to be true.

Then again, she did get knocked up by Chris, who ended up screwing her sister and potentially knocking her up, so there is that. Come to think of it, Chris, despite being very attractive, is actually rather repulsive. Isaiah is Clara's cousin and half-brother? I also have to wonder why Jenny willingly schtupped her sister's husband. Or why/how she passed off Isaiah as Jonah's child when she probably knew that he wasn't. What awful people. Yet I digress.

Regretting You, as stated, relies on the collective stupidity of many people. It also relies on a lot of deception. Miller, we find in the end, has always wanted Clara, down to having the city limit sign bit be in part a way to win her attention. You had Clara never wondering anything, except about why Miller followed and unfollowed her on Instagram. Despite an almost two-hour runtime, Regretting You does not have much of a buildup. Our loathsome adulterers are dumped rather quickly. That means both Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald have little to do. Eastwood is the one who suffers the most, as he was just there to look pretty. Fitzgerald's Jenny had interactions with Clara and Morgan. In retrospect, she is pretty much a monster.

Our two new couples are no better. Perhaps I can say that both Williams & Franco and Grace and Thames did their best. It wasn't very good. Mason Thames was pretty, I suppose. He was pretty blank as Miller, who was the nicest bad boy that I have come across. It was not a good performance, but it was a performance. Same for Franco, who is total milquetoast as Jonah. I have no objection to sensitive men. I have objection to wimps.

Williams as the mother and Grace as the daughter also, I presume, give it their all. They came across as whiny, both of them.

I do not hate Regretting You. It's bland and forgettable, a bit dull and not very interesting. It is just there. I won't say that people will regret seeing Regretting You. They will just keep forgetting they saw it to begin with.  

DECISION: C-