The Choice (2016)

Another February, another Nicholas Sparks adaptation, and another coastal town where the light is golden and the problems are soluble by devotion. The Choice arrives with all the trappings of its lineage: a veterinarian named Travis, a medical student named Gabby, a dog, a private islet, and a coma. It is a film assembled from a kit, and the kit has been used before.

For a work so concerned with the heart, the film possesses almost no social consciousness to speak of. The cast is white by default, with two Black performers drifting through minor roles the screenplay never notices. Race goes entirely unexamined in this sun-dappled South. There is no LGBTQ presence, no body-positive gesture, no neurodivergent character, no historical reckoning. A hurricane does arrive to blow the wind chimes loose, which is weather as plot device and nothing more. The economy here is comfortable: doctors, a marina, a privately owned island. Wealth is not critiqued, it is upholstered. Gabby has agency of a sort, though it leads her toward marriage and motherhood with the reliability of a tide chart, and the film's idea of a woman's fulfillment is a man who waits. Nothing here lectures, because nothing here has a thesis. A film can be preachy or it can be this, and this is a nap in the sun.

What remains is a tear-jerker that asks nothing of the audience except tears, and earns few of those. Critics were unkind, audiences were gentler, and the box office was respectable enough. The Choice is a greeting card that has learned to move, and we are left to classify it with a solemnity it does not deserve.