The Best of Me (2014)

Nicholas Sparks has spent two decades producing a reliable commodity: small-town romance, tragic timing, and a death that arrives precisely when the tear ducts are primed. The Best of Me, his ninth trip to the well, delivers all of it. A pair of former high school sweethearts reunites after twenty years, a surrogate father dies, an oil rig explodes, and a heart transplant arrives in the final reel. The film was released in 2014 and panned by nearly everyone, which is its own kind of distinction. It finished fifth at the box office behind a Brad Pitt tank movie and an animated Day of the Dead comedy.

Searching this film for contemporary social consciousness is a bit like searching a haystack for a needle that was never manufactured. The cast is white, the romance is heterosexual, the politics are nonexistent. An oil rig explosion occurs in the opening minutes, and not a single character pauses to reflect on carbon emissions. A Black attorney, played by Clarke Peters, handles the reading of a will and is permitted to simply do his job. Race, class, gender, and the climate all go unmentioned. The film has exactly one concern: whether the audience will weep.

Critics treated it harshly, and the harshness is understandable. The dialogue strains. The flashback structure creaks. Yet there is something almost admirable in a film this thoroughly uninterested in instructing anyone. It wants to break your heart the old way, with rain, letters, and a garden planted for a woman who will arrive too late. No lectures are delivered. No lessons are assigned. It is a melodrama, unapologetic and unimproved, and it asks nothing of us but tears.