The latest adaptation of a bestseller from literary phenomenon Colleen Hoover – she of It Ends with Us – kicks off with a chilling moment of cultural flashback: a decade-and-a-half ago, young people are driving to the beach as the latest track by The Killers assaults the charts.
Have those Las Vegans already become signifiers of a lost era?
Anyway, all this becomes more confusing when we join our characters in the film’s “present day”. Morgan and Chris (Allison Williams and Scott Eastwood), seen earlier as a pregnancy is revealed, now live in North Carolinian complacency with their 16-year-old daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace).
Jenny and Jonah (Willa Fitzgerald and Dave Franco), respectively Morgan’s sister and Chris’s best bud, are always there to share a beer and chew over a family crisis – such as when Clara starts dating a dangerous outsider in a leather jacket (the terminally unthreatening Mason Thames). Or maybe this Miller Adams doesn’t wear a leather jacket. Maybe he just leans on lamp-posts in a way that suggests he might one day do such a thing.
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The script expresses some dialogue as social-media text. At least one emotional switch-around is signalled by an unfollowing on Instagram.
But it is startling how much Regretting You suggests a white-picket-fence drama of the 1950s. Everyone has enough money. Everyone is in blistering good health. Okay, not quite everyone. Miller lives in polite poverty with his ailing “gramps” (Clancy Brown), but we suspect benevolent capitalism will soon lend a hand.
To continue the comparison, this is not the ironic Eisenhower perfection of a David Lynch film.
Miller Adams, initially misunderstood, is not some James Dean, ready to rebel with no good cause. He is the sort of budding film student who demonstrates his enthusiasm by taping posters of School of Rock and Patriot Games to the wall.
Franco’s character feels like the Peter-perfect alter ego of a Silver Age superhero who never actually appears. Nothing to disturb the suffocating monotony of an orthodontically perfect America that exists on its own, almost entirely white planet.
Hoover fans will know that, early on, a catastrophe looks to upset the order. Nothing in the film-making suggests, however, this dilemma will not be tidied away by the time of senior prom. Who would want to live in so dull a fantasy?
