Endless Love (2014)

Endless Love arrives as the second cinematic pass at Scott Spencer's 1979 novel, following the 1981 Brooke Shields vehicle that the author himself regarded as a betrayal. This version, directed by Shana Feste, sands the source down to a glossy Georgia-set romance in which a privileged girl named Jade and a working-class boy named David fall hard, then spend the back half dodging her father. The author called the screenplay dreary. Critics were less generous. The film earned back its budget and little else.

The social inventory here is thin. Jade defies her controlling father to choose her own romantic partner, and her mother eventually takes her side, which registers as standard teenage rebellion dressed in mild autonomy. The Butterfield money sits opposite David's humbler circumstances, but wealth is a plot obstacle, not a villain to be dismantled. Dayo Okeniyi appears as Mace, a friend who matters to the narrative and carries no commentary whatsoever. Beyond that, the frame is white, straight, conventionally beautiful, and entirely uninterested in the body, the climate, the mind's varied wiring, or the past. Nothing is being argued. Nobody is being taught.

That absence of instruction is the film's one genuine distinction in the current climate. A romance this incurious about the world around it has become a rarity, and there is a strange integrity in its refusal to sermonize. What remains is a candle, a lake house, and two attractive people staring at each other. We have classified worse. We have rarely classified less.