Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, and quite needlessly, for mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.25.08
Buy DVD: Nights in Rodanthe
• Buy Blu-Ray: Nights in Rodanthe (+ BD-Live) [Blu-ray]
Full disclosure time:
I'm a hard-core romantic and a sucker for sweet little love stories; were it not for light-hearted caper thrillers — absolutely my favorite genre — starry-eyed melodramas would occupy the No. 1 spot.
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| Dr. Paul Flanner (Richard Gere), having traveled to North Carolina's Outer Banks during the off-season, for a supremely uncomfortable personal errand, doesn't wish to eat alone at the inn managed by Adrienne Willis (Diane Lane); he therefore brings his dinner into the kitchen and joins her. It's a cute, gently flirtatious scene; sadly, the rest of the film can't match its charm. |
And I'm absolutely equal-opportunity; I don't care whether the equation's two halves are a guy and a gal, two members of the same gender, mismatched robots or cowboy string-dolls named Woody and Jessie. As long as they fall into each other's arms as the final act concludes — or we know they will — I'm a happy camper.
Shirley MacLaine's sidelong demand that Jack Lemmon "Shut up and deal," at the end of 1960's The Apartment
, is one of the greatest — and most romantic — closing lines ever written for a film. I mention all this by way of demonstrating that I am, quite clearly, part of the target audience for director George C. Wolfe's adaptation of Nights in Rodanthe, scripted by Ann Peacock and John Romano, and based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks
. But despite my genre willingness, this flick did nothing for me.
Sparks, frequently courted by Hollywood, has a tendency to ladle his melodrama with a trowel; the films adapted from his overly contrived novels often suffer from the same disease.
Sparks' characters don't just suffer; they endure the overwhelming mental anguish of the damned.
It might work on the printed page, but selling such purple melodrama on the big screen depends on the acting talent involved.
Kevin Costner spent all of 1998's dreary and laughably improbable Message in a Bottle
looking for character motivation. 2002's A Walk to Remember
— despite the sympathetic treatment of its religious protagonist — was little more than a hiccup in Mandy Moore's slow rise up Hollywood's ladder of fame. The Notebook
, depending on your tolerance for such stuff, was either too maudlin for words or too sad to endure, although it certainly boasted a strong cast. Which brings us to Nights in Rodanthe, which gets some of its notoriety for once again re-uniting stars Richard Gere and Diane Lane, who struck reasonably tragic sparks in Unfaithful
, and first worked together all the way back in The Cotton Club
.Lane can act — quite well, in fact — and she pulls off this story's tougher scenes.
Gere cannot, and does not.
