When Chris Grant (Scott Eastwood) is killed in a car crash alongside his sister-in-law Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) in Regretting You (12A), it exposes the fact that they were having an affair. The revelation opens up a Pandora’s Box of reactions from Chris’ wife Morgan (Allison Williams), his daughter Clara (McKenna Grace) and Jenny’s husband Jonah (Dave Franco) who has feelings for Morgan.
The interlocking traumas, fuelled mainly by burgeoning tensions between Morgan and Clara, is the main business of this Douglas Sirk-style tale of smalltown lives rocked by one scandal after another.
Josh Boone directs with the same blancmange patina he employed on The Fault in Our Stars. He’s served well by an intense performance from Williams, whose eyes bulge so much at times you feel they’re going to burst out of their sockets.
Grace is also effective as Clara, conveying innocence and confusion well, though she under-reacts both to the joint deaths of her father an aunt (taking French leave at their funeral) and, later on, to the news that they were, as they say, “an item.” Her behaviour makes you feel the film should have been called ‘Forgetting You’ instead of ‘Regretting You.’ A drunken graveside visit late on doesn’t really cut the mustard.
There’s also her relationship with Miller, played by Mason Thames, who has a Jesse Eisenberg thing going. Smaller parts are filled by peripheral characters like the kooky Lexie (Same Morelos) and the kindly “Gramps” (Clancy Brown).
The film is perhaps overladen with characters like this that Boone does little with. In another director’s hands, Colleen Hoover’s controversial 2019 novel could have become a kind of “Peyton Place” or even a “Steel Magnolias.” Boone is content to do a Sebastian Faulks on it, wrapping everything up in pink ribbons with his predictably schmaltzy finale.
In a film short on incident, I also thought we should have seen the crash that sees off Chris and Jenny instead of just hearing about it. And in the 17 year gap between the first scene and the second, Eastwood (Clint’s son) doesn’t seem to age 17 years. In fact, he doesn’t even seem to age 17 minutes.
But this is still an enjoyable film about the different ways people grieve – or fail to – and how they slough off the mistakes of their past in order to avoid repeating them. It transplants a conventional melodrama onto a contemporary tableau almost seamlessly. Boone is good at making saccharine material cute. 15 minutes was lopped off the running time it would have made the tidying up of the various relationships less yawnful.
Also on release at the moment is Annemarie Jacir’s timely Palestine 36, which deals with the Palestinian revolt against British colonialism in 1936. It began shooting at the beginning of 2023 but was shut down after the Hamas attacks of October 7 of that year. Almost two years later, Jacir shot the final scenes of her sprawling epic to widespread acclaim
