When the Nicholas Sparks Formula is Trampled by Wild Horses (Nights in Rodanthe)

So on the plane ride back from Italy, I was subjected to the latest Nicholas Sparks movie-turned-novel slush-fest that is Nights in Rodanthe. Now, granted, I adore The Notebook, I think it's a great movie and there are reasons for that. I have much more mixed feelings about A Walk to Remember (namely the vomitatiously flawless, marytred characters). But Nights in Rodanthe sealed my opinion that, with The Notebook, Sparks, thanks in part to director Nick Cassavetes, struck gold for the first and last time.

Basically, Adrienne Willis (Diane Lane) is an almost-divorcee whose marriage seems to be falling apart. In the interim, she is running her friend Jean's house-turned-hotel on the beach in The Middle of Nowhere. And in walks Paul Flanner (Richard Gere), a successful, well-dressed doctor who has some mysterious tragic purpose for coming out to Bumfuck. Turns out he accidentally killed a patient because he was distracted by his personal life during the operation (except that in a later, garbled explanation, it turns out she was actually allergic to the anaesthesia, so Gere neatly slips out of that moral noose). And then they fall in love.

Which would all be fine if the resolution to the possibly interesting moral obstacle weren't solved so quickly and easily and by such a nice, forgiving man as the dead lady's husband. It's lucky the acting is good, such as Scott Glenn's performance as Robert Torrelson, the dead woman's husband, or else you might as well have substituted cardboard cutouts in for the characters.

And then there's the script. Ugh. This is the key problem in the film. The dialogue is so melodramatic, so ridiculous, and so contrived that it's hard to keep a straight face even when Diane Lane is sobbing hysterically and clutching a letter to her chest because the whole story has been so goofy. Especially priceless are the arguments Lane has with her daughter Amanda, played by Mae Whitman. Then you have lines like:

Lane, looking wistful and tracing the tabletop with a single finger: "I gave up art...when I got married..."

oh yeah. Real subtle.

Then there's the deep conversations between Lane and Gere during their courtship:

"What's this box, Adrienne?"
"I made that. It's to keep special things safe."
"Yes, Adrienne, but what keeps you safe?"

"..."
"Your PENIS!"

But seriously. Maybe people in real life do say idiotic stuff like that to each other. Not me.

I won't discuss the tornado scene. Let's just say that it was possibly one of the most confusing, ill-constructed scenes in a movie I've ever seen.

Even the one original plot twist is screwed up by goopy, icky slow-motion flashbacks of the tragedy and how it EXACTLY happened so that the audience can, purportedly, be further tortured and shed buckets of tears. I was rolling my eyes, and I'm not even a cynic.

Seriously, this movie was awful. The culmination of all of this awfulness, however, was the wild horses. We're clued in at the beginning that, because Lane says, "No, the wild horses never come this far up the coast," that exactly the opposite will happen. And then, at the end of the movie, Lane is walking down the beach melancholically and what do you know? Thirty, count 'em, thirty horses or more come galloping full-speed down the beach, manes billowing brilliantly in the wind. I know that horses are naturally herd animals, but when I was on Chincoteague I never saw more than two or three horses together at a time. Perhaps the movie would have been more interesting if Lane was trampled at the end.

-elln