“Regretting You” is Exactly as Advertised and That’s Okay
Romantic comedies have a type of logic all to themselves. Sure, there are films that subvert the usual trappings of the genre, but there’s also something comforting in the insanity that makes up another subset of the rom com. This type of film has had a woman blow up her entire life for the voice of a man she heard on the radio. It’s the genre that’s home to a woman pretending to be in a relationship with a stranger who fell into a coma, and then actually falls in love with the coma-man’s brother. Romantic comedies are undeniably a little off the wall, but if you’re going to make something that asks us to suspend our disbelief, you’d better be ready to make us laugh, cry, and swoon. That’s what Josh Boone’s adaptation of the Colleen Hoover book Regretting You does.
Regretting You opens in 2009 with the visual of a beat-up truck hurtling down a North Carolina road as The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” plays. Morgan (Allison Williams), her sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), and their high school boyfriends, Jonah (Dave Franco) and Chris (Scott Eastwood), are in their senior year, trying to score some beer. The couples seem mismatched, as Jonah and Morgan are more reserved, happy to sit on the sidelines while their partners, Jenny and Chris, are comfortable being the center of attention. The film then jumps seventeen years into the future, where we learn that Morgan and Chris got pregnant as teens and are now married with a daughter of their own, Clara (Mckenna Grace). Jenny and Jonah broke up not long after the end of senior year, but have since gotten back together and have a baby named Elijah. Their picturesque world is shattered when Jonah and Chris die in a car accident, leaving Clara, Morgan, Jonah, and Elijah to pick up the pieces and realize that maybe their lives weren’t as perfect as they’d thought.
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
If you are someone who anxiously awaited the new release of each Nicholas Sparks adaptation or saw the trailer of Regretting You and found yourself charmed, then Boone delivers exactly what you want. Regretting You isn’t particularly interested in carving its own path in the world of romantic comedies, and that’s not, in itself, a bad thing. We all have films that we return to because they bring us comfort in their reliability. You can roughly chart the story beats of Regretting You from the trailer. Sure, you might not be able to guess the quirky meet-cute that happens between Clara and her high school crush, Miller (Mason Thames), but you know those two crazy kids are going to end up together.
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
To come into Regretting You expecting it to be more than the simple tearjerker rom com it clearly advertises itself to be is a mistake. This is a movie about a woman whose husband and sister die, and she ends up with her brother-in-law, who she’s had a crush on since high school. That’s not even a spoiler, because the trailer all but confirms it. Logic as we know it doesn’t exist in these circumstances, and it shouldn’t have to. If we look at Regretting You through the lens of a mindless action movie, it checks all the same boxes. The cast is utterly charming, particularly Grace and Thames as the lovey-dovey teenage couple, and the script gives all the actors a chance to crack a few jokes. Sam Morelos plays the rom com best friend role so pitch-perfectly that you wish she had a larger piece of the film.
At the end of the day, Regretting You is a film that lets its thirty-seven and forty-year-old leads play their high school selves. That tells you something already. It’s a movie that takes itself seriously enough to be endearing, but knows that it’s not revolutionizing the romantic comedy genre, and that’s okay. In a time when things feel so heavy, what’s so wrong about living in a simple world like this? It’s fun to escape to a silly place of big romantic speeches, kisses in the rain, and quickly forgotten dead loved ones, and that’s the world Regretting You firmly lives in.
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