Film Review of the Week

Romance

Regretting You (12A)

Review: I’m an eternally hopeful romantic and a sucker for a well-written thwarted romance (While You Were Sleeping is a genre masterpiece and I won’t hear anything to the contrary.) Josh Boone’s soppy drama, set in motion by a tragic car accident, should be my catnip. Alas, this glossy tearjerker from the director of The Fault In Our Stars is a tonally inconsistent wish-fulfilment fantasy that doesn’t lay the emotional groundwork to earn its various deluges of on-screen tears.

Adapted by screenwriter Susan McMartin from the book by Colleen Hoover, author of It Ends With Us, Regretting You heals the broken hearts of a grief-stricken mother and daughter by gifting the characters dreamily adoring and sensitive suitors, who are prone to gushing outbursts like, “There’s no version of you that’s boring”. Flashbacks to childhood, which cast Allison Williams, Dave Franco, Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald as their awkward teenage selves, are oddly disconcerting and confirm there must be something in the water when characters barely age a day between two narrative timelines, 17 years apart. Declarations of love are blurted, and reciprocated, with a casualness that diminishes the importance of these words and dilutes the parallel journeys of mother and daughter, who bond over mood boards festooned with handwritten words of self-empowerment.

Morgan Grant (Williams) has devoted her life to raising 16-year-old daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace) and supporting her doctor husband Chris (Eastwood), who works at a local hospital where her younger sister Jenny (Fitzgerald) is a nurse. Morgan’s carefully ordered life is shattered when Chris dies in a car accident and the other passenger in the car turns out to be Jenny. The circumstances of the accident confirm Chris was having an affair with Jenny, which devastates Morgan and Jenny’s husband Jonah (Franco). Grieving spouses cling to each other for support and agree to conceal the truth about the accident from Clara so her memories of her father and aunt are unsullied by the infidelity.

The angry teenager processes her emotions with the help of quirky best friend Lexie (Sam Morelos) and her crush, Miller (Mason Thames), who already has a girlfriend and is putting his dreams of film school on hold to take care of his terminally ill grandfather (Clancy Brown). While Morgan and Jonah navigate their blatantly obvious feelings for each other, kindled in childhood, Clara and Miller follow suit same. Like mother, like daughter.

Regretting You doesn’t deviate from heavily signposted paths for Morgan and Clara, introducing instances of mild conflict to pad out the running time. Williams and Grace are a likeable double-act and both actors work hard to add flesh to bare-bones characters in crisis. Comical interludes are cute but jar when juxtaposed with gut-wrenching grief and betrayal.

Drama

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (12A)

Review: Writer-director Scott Cooper shepherded Jeff Bridges to an Oscar with his directorial debut Crazy Heart. He revisits the Sturm und Drang of the music industry with a biographical drama about Bruce Springsteen, intensely focused on a two-year period when The Boss frustrated his record label by concentrating on a low-fi passion project. Based on Warren Zanes’ book, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere plunges headfirst into the singer’s ferocious tussle with anxiety and depression rooted in childhood trauma.

Black and white flashbacks to childhood in New Jersey offer unsettling glimpses at the strained relationship between eight-year-old Bruce (Matthew Anthony Pellicano), his bullying, alcoholic father Dutch (Stephen Graham) and placative mother Adele (Gaby Hoffmann). Jeremy Allen White, multi-award-winning star of The Bear, recorded his own versions of Springsteen’s hits including a thrilling rendition of Born To Run to sensitively portray The Boss at a critical juncture in his personal journey. His electrifying performance elevates Cooper’s introspective and affecting picture.

A topsy-turvy fledgling romance with single mother Faye Romano (Odessa Young), invented for the film, is given short dramatic shrift and consequently feels surplus to requirements. Indeed, the most compelling relationship is between Bruce and manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), who vociferously protects the star from a record label that values commercial viability over creative excellence. When Jon asserts, “You got to feed the machine”, Bruce tenderly counters, “That’s not us, Jon”.

In 1981, Bruce Springsteen (White) completes his world tour to promote double album The River with two sweat-drenched concert dates in Cincinnati. Columbia Records executive Al Teller (David Krumholtz) expects Bruce to capitalise on his rising fame with a new LP of singles to rival top 10 hit Hungry Heart. Instead, the physically exhausted singer-songwriter returns to his hometown of Colts Neck, New Jersey and exorcises demons on more than a dozen tracks captured on a four-track recorder in his bedroom. Bruce tells his manager that he is “trying to find some real in all the noise”.

Ten songs from the homemade cassette are chosen for new LP Nebraska and Bruce insists it should be released as originally recorded, imperfections et al. Standout track Born In The USA, which Bruce rerecords in the studio with his band, is temporarily sidelined to Al’s mounting despair. He fears his golden goose is poised to lay a cracked egg that no one will buy.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is a compelling portrait of a tortured artist in the throes of a mental health crisis. White’s sensational gruff-voiced performance steadfastly sidesteps mimicry and shines a light on the emotional rawness and vulnerability that have become an intrinsic part of Springsteen’s brand. Concert sequences up the tempo but for prolonged periods of its two-hour run time, Cooper’s picture is born to walk, with a swagger, not run..