Grief, infidelity tear a family apart in new Colleen Hoover adaptation

3 hours ago 4

FILM
Regretting You ★★
(M) 116 minutes

American novelist Colleen Hoover is a publishing phenomenon. Copious proof of her books’ popularity can be found online where her fans obsessively analyse her plotlines, her characters’ motivations and the fans’ need for “closure” – Hoover-speak for a satisfying conclusion.

Allison Williams and McKenna Grace in Regretting You.

CoHorts, as her readers are known, turned out in force last year for the first Hoover screen adaptation, It Ends With Us, an incompatible mingling of erotic cliché and domestic abuse starring Blake Lively and the film’s director, Justin Baldoni, as her equally glamorous abuser.

The latest one, Regretting You, is less controversial but once again there’s grit in the syrup and grief, infidelity and fractious family relationships shape the many obstacles on the way to a happy ending.

As teenagers, Morgan (Allison Williams) and her younger sister, Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) are attracted to their opposites. The serious-minded Morgan is going out with Chris (Scott Eastwood), the life of every party, while Jenny, another extrovert, is with Jonah (Dave Franco), who has much in common with Morgan.

And with that passage of exposition out of the way, we skip 17 years to find that Morgan married Chris after becoming pregnant with their daughter, Clara, while Jenny has recently had a baby with Jonah who came back into her life after a long absence.

All seems relatively calm except for the friction between 17-year-old Clara (McKenna Grace) and her overprotective mother who disapproves of her new boyfriend, Miller Adams (Mason Thames). Then comes the bombshell. Chris and Jenny are killed in a car crash and in the aftermath, Morgan and Jonah discover that the pair had been having an affair for years.

The resulting emotional tangle is examined from every angle as each of the main characters goes into a whirling cycle of conflicted feelings. Jonah now believes that Chris is the father of the baby he thought was his and Morgan’s anger over her dead husband’s unfaithfulness is inhibited by her determination that Clara should not be told about it.

There is no doubt that a genuine tragedian could turn all this into psychological gold. After all, it was Tolstoy who came up with the frequently quoted line about every unhappy family being unhappy in its own way. But the film’s director, Josh Boone, isn’t out to make anything unique here.

Instead, he and the screenwriter, Susan McMartin, embrace the commonplace with an enthusiasm that dilutes the drama and takes us on a swift descent into bathos en route to a weepy finish. It features a lot of slouching mournfully in front of television with some binge-drinking and eruptions of shouting and furniture-smashing on the side. And some of it is moderately funny – intentionally, I think, although it’s hard to tell – but the dialogue is so trite and the pace so ponderous that any sense of surprise evaporates in the first half-hour.

Regretting You is in cinemas from Thursday, October 23.

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