Colleen Hoover now occupies a space like the one John Grisham did in the 1990s: a rare contemporary novelist whose work Hollywood constantly adapts, often with multiple movies every year. The latest Hoover adaptation is Verity, a film about the act of novel-writing itself, along with romantic intrigue, mystery and betrayal. Much as I enjoyed all three lead performances, I’ve seen much better versions of this before, and the ending is laughable.
It’s somewhat entertaining trash. Last year's The Housemaid was much tighter and had a better ending. Verity’s set-up is somewhat complex, introducing three different fatal or near-fatal accidents, all in the first act. Lowen (Dakota Johnson) is a struggling novelist, the kind who lives with the embarrassment of having only three people show up at her book signing. Walking down the street one day, she witnesses a bike messenger struck and killed by a car. After this, she’s comforted by a mystery man named Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), who mentions that he stopped working after his daughter drowned in a lake.
Lowen is soon summoned to a meeting, where she’s offered a dream gig: ghostwriting three novels in a series for mega-popular novelist Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), who’s secretly incapacitated after a car accident. The twist? Jeremy is Verity’s husband. A real publishing company (Hachette, the parent company of Hoover’s publisher) lends its name to the company, and the way the film tries to convey a large-scale literary fraud, which includes concealing that a star author is in a coma and someone else is doing the writing,= is a fascinating thread that I wish it had pulled on more.
The bulk of Verity is spent at the family’s sprawling Vermont house, where Lowen goes through Verity’s notes while living with Jeremy and their surviving son. Verity’s there too, though she’s comatose; Hathaway appears in flashbacks and in YouTube clips, including one of her on Hot Ones.
Once Lowen discovers a secret manuscript, we’re meant to ask: How could Verity, who seemed to cultivate a friendly, likable public persona, write such dark material? Is she really as comatose as she appears? Is Jeremy everything he seems? Is an affair inevitable? And what really happened with that accident out on the water (or, for that matter, the two other accidents)?
We know a twist ending is coming; I had one in mind, but I can’t overstate how ridiculous and unsatisfying the actual ending is. It leaves too much ambiguity and an uncomfortable number of plot holes. I really liked one character, who turns out to be a red herring and never figures into the plot at all. And there are echoes of the Lindsay Clancy case in the plot that are going to make a lot of people uncomfortable.
Hartnett’s gone through a resurgence lately, while Johnson, after some wretched performances earlier this decade, is on something of a winning streak. Hathaway, in her fifth and final movie performance of the year, finds something fascinating in a somewhat unknowable character who exists at a remove. But in the end, Verity isn’t much better than most other Colleen Hoover adaptations. At least the aftermath will likely be smoother than the one in It Ends With Us.