“Do you want the poster, necklace and stickers?” asks the ticket taker.
“Necklace?” I wonder as he hands me a gold heart with the words “No Regrets.” I stuff the freebies into my bag before heading into the theater for “A Night of No Regrets,” the marketing tagline for the Thursday evening screening of the latest Colleen Hoover adaptation, “Regretting You.”
The vibe of the theater is noticeably different from the early fan screening of last year’s “It Ends With Us.” The theater is quiet and mostly empty. There are no large, multigenerational groups of women. The anti-climactic energy of the evening intensifies when a behind-the-scenes video begins to play as the lead-in to the nationwide livestream of a 40-minute panel with director Josh Boone and leads Allison Williams, Dave Franco and Mason Thames (McKenna Grace was unavailable).
In the video, Williams talks about the pressure of adapting a book, saying, “With any book adaptation, you’re breathing life into something that exists so personally for people.” During the panel, Boone addresses this pressure, saying he avoided it entirely because the film is “doing the book.”
This is the movie’s biggest problem. “Regretting You” is a loyal adaptation of its source to a fault.
McKenna Grace as Clara and Mason Thames as Miller in “Regretting You.”
Jessica Miglio / Paramount Pictures
The 2019 novel is about a 34-year-old mother, Morgan (Williams), and her daughter, Clara (Grace), who is on the cusp of turning 17, the same age the mom was when she got pregnant and married Chris (Scott Eastwood), her high school boyfriend. Told in alternating viewpoints, the coming-of-age story shows Morgan grappling with a present she never expected to be living in and a past she can’t let go of, while her daughter is falling in love for the first time as she navigates her first big loss. These dynamics are complicated by Jonah (Franco), Morgan’s best friend from high school who has always loved her, and Miller (Thames), the boy Clara can’t stop thinking about.
In reality, Chris’ death may be the trauma that kicks off the book’s events, but it’s not the central plot of the novel. Instead, the story’s true focus is Morgan and Clara’s respective connections to Jonah and Miller.
Like all of Hoover’s books, this means the story is really about the messiness of life and what it can be like to navigate that messiness as a girl or a woman. The difference here is that the mess is not revelatory. It is just meh. The plot twists and emotional reveals aren’t that interesting or gut-wrenching, and the romantic complications are not worthy of the kind of swoon that CoHo readers crave.
This is why it should surprise no one that the movie is already being panned as a “bad soap opera” that is inescapably unoriginal and “has the sheen of streaming.” These valid criticisms should be expected when the source material lacks the essence that made “It Ends With Us” a bestseller before it became a blockbuster hit.
Allison Williams as Morgan in “Regretting You.”
Jessica Miglio / Paramount Pictures
It’s also hard to have high expectations for a movie that begins with a flashback to a pregnancy test purchased in a gas station bathroom on the way to an early aughts house party. It’s even harder when this trope-laden scene is being portrayed by actors in their 30s who have undergone computerized de-aging that is distracting and off-putting.
These problems plague the awkward dialogue (some exchanges are taken directly from the book, but others are added in Susan McMartin’s screenplay), poor chemistry, slow pacing and overly dramatic soundtrack.
During the panel, the interviewer asks Williams about the similarities between Morgan and her most famous role, Marnie in HBO’s “Girls,” because they are both type-A people trying to control a very uncontrollable world. Williams said that, in essence, being a Marnie-like character is deeply being one thing while striving to be another. That is an apt description for “Regretting You.”
At their core, the book and movie are uninspired, less interesting versions of Hoover’s more captivating stories, and they waste the potential that exists. However, while the plot elements of both the novel and movie are a progression of predictable tropes, the themes that “Regretting You” explores are universal and deserve to be more developed.
For example, Morgan’s internal monologue in the book reveals how much motherhood has shaped her understanding of herself.
On her 34th birthday, the day before her husband dies, she reflects on what her life is going to look like now that her daughter is about to graduate from high school. She’s been a stay-at-home mom, and Chris and Morgan have been her entire world, and now she wants to figure out what passion to explore in her life for herself.
In the book, this is simplified to Morgan reenrolling in college. In the film, it’s reduced to multiple montages of Morgan sitting in her pristine midcentury-modern house and sketching ideas for renovating it to make it her own. This surface-level depiction of agency — one that is ironically contained within the house she has already spent 17 years making a home — negates the complexity of finding agency within the role of mothering.
This is an especially wasted opportunity because the film’s idea of regret naturally lends itself to this theme and to what motherhood asks and gives and takes over time.
Allison Williams as Morgan and McKenna Grace as Clara in “Regretting You.”
Jessica Miglio / Paramount Pictures
The “no regrets” necklace that I was handed on my way into the theater highlights how this movie is less about grief and more about repercussions. With a better script and an injection of emotion, the film could have been a cathartic outlet for reexamining how sometimes in life you feel like you’ve gotten it wrong, how you question the things done and left undone and things confessed and left unsaid. It’s about the difference between choosing to be with someone and actually loving them.
I wish that the movie had deviated from the book and leaned into examining these regrets that can follow any decision. Instead, in the movie, this complexity is reduced to the all-too-obvious acknowledgment that, yes, like Morgan and Jonah, you can get it wrong as a teenager, but sometimes that wrong makes a right because you have a child you love more than your regrets. The movie could have been so much more than a two-hour reiteration of that oversimplification that doesn’t even make you feel the fizz of first love or the relief of a love finally realized.
At the end of the panel, Boone said he is grateful that Hoover has the popularity to bring a movie like “Regretting You” — one about spouses and children and the things people are experiencing in their lives — into theaters. This is a rare gift in today’s streaming and franchise-heavy landscape, and people, especially women, deserve to see their realities reflected back to them, not further reduced into meaningless tropes that make them regret they went to the theater in the first place.
TruthHas NoBias
Your SupportFuelsOur Mission
Your SupportFuelsOur Mission
We Won’t Back Down
As more major networks align with those in power, the space for fearless journalism is shrinking. By becoming a member, you support a newsroom that asks the tough questions, no matter who’s in charge.
We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves.
Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again.
We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves.
Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again.
Support HuffPost
Already a member? Log in to hide these messages.
“Regretting You” is in theaters now.
