I couldn't disagree with you more. And I'm someone who's always complaining about too-predictable story beats and endings that are too neat and positive. St. Vincent, for example, but I could give you twenty others.
You seemed to have missed the point of the scene where Darian tells Nadine that Krista is basically the only thing that makes his life tolerable, and that he knows it's "destroying" Nadine. Nadine realizes he's not as self-centered as she thinks he is, and she gets the irony that she's being the self-centered one. (Nadine confuses self-confidence with self-absorption, when she's the living proof that the two have nothing to do with one another.) Her apology to him follows from those insights.
I don't know whether you're complaining that her mom checked up on her after she got up at a ridiculous early hour on a Saturday and left the house nicely dressed, or that she ultimately accepted Nadine's text "I'm safe." Both of those rang perfectly true to me. The checking on her is almost a reflex; when she thinks it through she finds Nadine's reply reasonable. What's your argument that it rings false? Nadine's is behaving completely unlike herself; of course her Mom's going to check on her without thinking it through. And yet when she does think it through, there's obviously nothing to be concerned about. And we get to see the process by which she has to force her feelings to match her understanding.
You don't seem to get that Erwin's film was a fantasy of winning her over and then blowing her off as punishment for her having toyed with him. And that he succeeded in making the same point by denying to her that this was the case, as if to say, no, I had a much bigger crush on some other girl, and you were typically oblivious of it. He gets to make the point he wanted to make, about her self-absorption, without actually rejecting her. I thought that was brilliant.
And then, as The_ROUSes has pointed out, Erwin introduces her to his friends, and she says hi. That's all. Sure, it's implied that she will become part of their circle of friends, but of course it's also implied that it won't be easy for her.
Movie endings ring false when the hero or heroine does something out of character, when they make too much progress towards getting their act together, too quickly, without it having been earned. I mean, really -- in the moment precisely preceding the mildly happy ending, she is taken down a huge peg by the guy she's beginning to truly learn to like. The movie ends with a natural, small step in the direction of getting it together (much like Sideways, Up in the Air, Greenberg, and a bunch of other films, with the obvious difference being that Nadine's problems are typical for a teenager, while the characters in those films are all seriously messed up adults.)
Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.
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