Nights in Rodanthe (2008)

Nights in Rodanthe arrived in 2008 as the fourth cinematic harvest of a Nicholas Sparks novel, pairing Diane Lane and Richard Gere for a third time and asking them to generate passion across a windswept North Carolina inn. The hurricane supplies the third act. The letters supply the second. The first act supplies a woman deciding whether to take back the husband who left her, which the film treats as a genuine dilemma deserving of ninety minutes. It finished second at the box office behind Eagle Eye, a fact the studio has presumably filed under dignity.

The film's social consciousness is faint but traceable. Viola Davis appears as a friend and confidante, present and unremarked, which is about the most a 2008 studio romance was prepared to offer. Adrienne's separation from her unfaithful husband gestures toward self-reclamation, though the film routes every ounce of that independence back into romantic fulfillment, as if a woman's autonomy were merely the antechamber to the correct man. Race goes unmentioned in this white coastal milieu. Class goes unmentioned. The environment is a plot device with rain in it. A patient's facial hemangioma exists solely to explain a surgeon's guilt, not to say anything about bodies or beauty. The question of queerness does not arise, because in this world it does not exist.

What remains is the sermonizing, soft and constant. The film believes in a rare and special love, and it will tell us so, gently, at length, with the ocean behind it. This is schmaltz executed by competent hands with no urgency behind it. The result is a film that means well and risks nothing, which is its own kind of statement. Two stars for the craft, none for the courage, and a modest nod to the horses, who asked for nothing and received it.

THEMATIC TAGS: book_adaptation