The Last Song (2010)

Here is a film assembled with the precision of a beach resort brochure. The Last Song arrived in 2010 as a Disney star vehicle for Miley Cyrus, engineered to graduate her from the Hannah Montana persona into something resembling adult drama. Nicholas Sparks supplied both the screenplay and the novel, in that order, which tells you everything about the priorities involved. A rebellious teenager is shipped to a Georgia beach town, reunites with her estranged father, falls for a volleyball-playing aquarium volunteer, and learns several lessons about mortality. The machinery is familiar and it runs on schedule.

Surveying the film for contemporary social consciousness yields a series of empty drawers. The cast is uniformly white, the romance is heterosexual and unexamined, and the emotional architecture rests on a girl's reconciliation with her dying father. There is a loggerhead turtle nest, protected overnight from raccoons, which is local wildlife stewardship and not a statement about the planet's fate. There are wealthy families with gated mansions, presented as scenery instead of indictment. A church burns, a boy lets another man take the blame, and the moral resolution is forgiveness. Nobody lectures. The film has no interest in instructing its audience about anything beyond the proper way to grieve.

The picture earned poor reviews and a healthy profit, which is its own kind of verdict. It wants tears, not converts. Julie Anne Robinson directs with a steady hand, and the presence of a woman behind the camera is a fact about the production, not a thesis within it. What we have is a melodrama that knows exactly what it is, a summer romance with a terminal illness folded in, and it makes no attempt to be anything else. Refreshing, in a quiet way.