Life's A Beach And Then You Die

By Pamela Zoslov

The Last Song represents a collision between two of the more synthetic entities in American popular culture: Nicholas Sparks novels and Disney’s Hannah Montana franchise star Miley Cyrus. It’s hard to say which is worse, Sparks’ predictably sappy, emotionally manipulative writing or the flat, charmless pout that passes for Cyrus’s acting.

Sparks’ winning sentimental formula is by now well known, and at this point in his successful career, he merely rearranges the elements in increasingly random ways. The Windswept Beachfront House. The Regrettable Divorce. The Lovers from Different Worlds. A Packet of Unread Letters. An Amazing Act of Self-Sacrifice. A Lingering But Impossibly Beautiful Death by Cancer. If The Last Song seems even more slipshod than previous Sparks adaptations, it may be because it was commissioned expressly as a star vehicle for Cyrus, then turned into a “novelization.” Co-written by Jeff Van Wie and directed by Julie Anne Robinson, the movie is so unfocused it makes this year’s earlier Sparks adaptation, Dear John, look like Shakespeare.

The story is about a rebellious New York teen named Ronnie (Cyrus) whose mom (Kelly Preston) brings her and her weepy little brother (Bobby Coleman) to spend the summer with Dad (Greg Kinnear) at his Windswept Beachfront House in Tybee Island, Georgia. Dad has little to do but tinker at making a stained-glass window for a church that burned down under suspicious circumstances. Under Dad’s tutelage, Ronnie was a piano prodigy at 5, but since the Regrettable Divorce, she hasn’t played a note. Nonetheless, she has been accepted into Juilliard without even having to audition.

Dressed in black and wearing combat boots on the beach, sullen Ronnie meets Will (real-life boyfriend Liam Hemsworth), a handsome, WASPy volleyball player who takes an inexplicable shine to her, to the chagrin of his rich, uptight mom. Will volunteers at the aquarium, where he takes Ronnie swimming in the fish tanks. Through Will’s transformative love, Ronnie opens her heart, rescues some baby sea turtles, plays some bad New Age piano music, wears a frilly dress to Will’s sister’s fancy wedding, and grows closer to her dad, just in time for….well, I shan’t spoil the rest for you.

Usually there is some redeeming quality in a Sparks movie — nice coastal scenery, Lasse Hallström’s excellent direction in Dear John. In this case it’s Greg Kinnear, who brings a pleasant sincerity to the part of the father. It takes real acting skill to be able to recite with conviction pseudo-profound Sparksian bromides like, “Love is fragile, and we’re not always its best caretakers.”

The movie may raise lumps in the throat among those susceptible, but its appeal is probably limited to young Miley Cyrus fans and diehard devotees of Nicholas Sparks.

Like a Hurricane (It Blows)

Wind in the Wallows: Nights in Rodanthe

Never do I admire the craft of acting more than when I see good actors giving everything they’ve got to make bad material work. It must take uncommon dedication to resist shredding the script into bitty pieces and stomping upon them screaming, “This is bullshit!”

In the case of Nights in Rodanthe, the hard-working actors are Diane Lane and Richard Gere, and the sow’s ear is a screenplay based on a book by Nicholas Sparks, an author known for a string of terrible — which is to say insanely popular — romantic novels

Sparks’ first manuscript, The Notebook, was plucked off the slush pile to net him a $1 million advance and propel him into the bestseller stratosphere. The book, later made into a weepy movie, launched a lucrative industry of Sparks novels aimed at sentimental women. The novels — Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, also filmed — feature heart-tugging variations on a basic Love Story plot, often told in flashback: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy or girl dies. Woven throughout the sappy prose are ideas about Christianity and fate. Sparks has found a winning formula, and it has made him very, very wealthy.

Does it matter that no one in the galaxy talks the way the author’s characters do? Of course not, because Sparks’ writing caters to a persistent romantic fantasy. His readers long for their men, who are likely to be found slouching in Barcaloungers, to spout poetry and say things like, “I know you’re hurting.”

Nights in Rodanthe tells the story of Adrienne (Lane), a middle-aged mother of two whose husband left her for another woman but now wants to return. Adrienne decides to think it over during a trip to look after a beachfront inn in North Carolina’s Outer Banks owned by her friend, lively African-American artist Jean (Viola Davis). Her children, meanwhile, are brattily pestering her to give Dad another chance.

The only guest at the inn that weekend is Paul Flanner (Gere), a wealthy dreamboat doctor with a troubled past. Having just left his marriage and sold his house, Paul has come to coastal Rodanthe to talk to an old man named Torrelson (Scott Glenn), who is suing Paul over the death of his wife on his operating table.

Paul continues on his path of redemption by joining his noble doctor son working in a clinic in Ecuador. It isn’t clear why Paul needs absolution, since the patient’s death wasn’t his fault, but according to the Sparks ethos, it’s because he didn’t care enough. “What color were her eyes?” the grieving Torrelson demands, as if any doctor would remember such a detail.

While in Ecuador, Paul writes long, romantic letters (letters -- how quaint!) to Adrienne every day, promising her a beautiful future with him. If you are familiar with Sparks’ books, you know that this blissful reunion can never be, but far be it from me to spoil the surprise as to which character joins the Choir Invisible.

Sparks’ novel tells its drippy tale in flashback, but screenwriters Ann Peacock and Joe Romano have set the story in the present, making it even less interesting, if that’s possible. What’s remarkable about the movie is the gulf between the skill of cast and crew and the banality of the material. It is the screen debut of the esteemed African-American theater director George C. Wolfe, who seems to have tried to make something lovely of the story, gracing it with a nicely windswept atmosphere, fine vintage music (Count Basie, Dinah Washington) and a grandiose hurricane scene that looks like something from a monster movie. But, like that precariously perched inn on sticks, these efforts are inadequate to defend against the gale-force winds of Sparks schmaltz.

Originally published in the Cleveland Scene. Visit them here.