Regretting You (12A) |Close-Up Film Review

The story opens with friends Morgan (Allison Williams) and Jonah (Dave Franco) chatting at a teenage beach party.  

We then jump forward seventeen years, the on screen caption tells us, and there they both are again looking not a day older. To add to the confusion there are two other females in the scene with exactly the same hairstyle as Morgan.  One of them is Morgan’s sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), who is now married to Jonah and is proudly passing round their cute new baby for admiration.  The other is Morgan’s now teenage daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace). 

That all takes us a bit of sorting out that, not helped by the fact that actress Grace, who is only nineteen but looks at least twenty four, is playing a character who cannot under the rules of biology be more than 16 – back at that beach party seventeen years earlier Morgan revealed that she was pregnant by her  now husband Chris (Scott Eastwood).

Once we’ve established who’s who and married to whom, the story, based on a best selling novel by Colleen Hoover, settles into the familiar territory that is usually the province of American tv soap opera.  Hoover’s previous best seller It Ends With Us was the basis for the film, which sparked a bitter legal battle between its co-stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.  This much milder offering  however wouldn’t start a storm in a teacup.

Chris and Jenny turn out not to have great parts, as fairly early on they both die in the same car crash – and that’s when the melodrama really gets going, as it emerges they were having an affair with each other – shock, horror – and Jonah suspects the new baby may not even be his.  Meanwhile Clara has found a cute boyfriend in Miller (Mason Thames) and her mother isn’t really sure she approves.   Clara is after all still legally a child – the age of consent in America being 18 – and some of the “necking” the young couple get up to is a bit close to the bone.  Oh and I forgot to mention, after all these years the spark is still there between Jonah and Morgan – turns out they both married the wrong partner. Will they get it together second time round?  Don’t hold your breath.

Thanks to some good actors however director Josh Boone manages to make this daft story about over privileged people sort of work.   After a while the film’s make up team allow Williams to look her age and she and Franco make an endearing pair of second chance lovers.   Grace as Clara is a good young actress, despite looking too old for the part – over enthusiastic make up team again –  and Thames as her boyfriend has something of the gauche charm of Jesse Eisenberg.

So if you fancy a bit of undemanding American style family melodrama cum romance, this could well be your date night at the movies.