THOSE FAMILIAR with the filmed novels of Nicholas Sparks like "Message in a Bottle", "A Walk to Remember", and "Night in Rodanthe" know that his works are sentimental romances that manipulate our emotions with tragedy when someone dies. In "The Notebook", both the lead characters even die at the same time, with their arms around each other. No doubt there's a big market for this sort of sappy entertainment, which is the reason why "Dear John", Sparks' latest filmed work, manage to dislodge "Avatar" from the U.S. box office charts after lording it on top for several weeks.
The story is about a Special Forces soldier on leave, John Tyree (Channing Tatum), and a pretty college girl on spring vacation, Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried), who meet in March 2001 in South Carolina. A chance encounter between them is transformed into a two-week whirlwind romance. But he has to return to service. By then, they've fallen deeply in love and continue their relationship through letters. Until John suddenly gets a letter from Savannah saying she wants to end the relationship. Because of this, he decides not to leave the army and goes into dangerous missions like his courting death. And he gets two bullets in one such task.
But of course, there's a twist in this kind of story. Suffice it to say that it turns out not to be the usual Sparks' material that requires weepers to consume a lot of tissue paper. Maybe because it's directed by Lasse Hallstrom, whose "My Life As a Dog" won the best foreign language film Oscar years ago and later got nominated again for his screen adaptation of "The Cider House Rules" and "Chocolat". It's still schmaltzy melodrama with some of the characters doing a lot of personal sacrifice for other characters, but done with more restraint. In the end, they even have a Star Cinema kind of conclusion where the concerned parties meet again after some years for the obligatory happy ending.
The first part of the movie showing how John and Savannah meet by chance and how their love story develops is pretty watchable. The second act becomes tedious and suffers from monotony showing them separated from each other exchanging correspondence by snail mail (they don't have email or cellphones), while we hear voice overs of what's going on in their respective lives. This is spiced up with montage shots accompanied by cheesy songs.
It perks up when John returns home after the bombing of the World Trade Center (the terrorists who did that are the real villains here) and they finally make love with each other in the barn, just like Piolo and Angel in "Love Me Again", but executed without eroticism. After that, it's back to boredom with the movie also focusing on John's relationship with his father (Richard Jenkins, who's quite touching here), a quiet, reclusive coin collector who compulsively bakes meatloaf on Saturdays and lasagna on Sundays.
The film is basically redeemed by the generally believable acting of the leads. We first saw Amanda Seyfried in the TV series "Big Love" where she already displayed fine emoting, and later in "Mamma Mia" where she held her own against Meryl Streep and in "Jennifer's Body" where she made mincemeat of Megan Fox. She gives a quiet but winning performance here as a young woman who has to make a crucial decision for the sake of an autistic boy and his sick dad (Henry Thomas, the former child actor in "E.T."). Channing Tatum won fans as a dancer in "Step Up" and as an action star in "G.I. Joe". Here, he manages to show that he can also do drama credibly as the heartbroken young soldier confused by his girlfriend's decisions, especially in his breakdown scene with his father at the hospital.
The story is about a Special Forces soldier on leave, John Tyree (Channing Tatum), and a pretty college girl on spring vacation, Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried), who meet in March 2001 in South Carolina. A chance encounter between them is transformed into a two-week whirlwind romance. But he has to return to service. By then, they've fallen deeply in love and continue their relationship through letters. Until John suddenly gets a letter from Savannah saying she wants to end the relationship. Because of this, he decides not to leave the army and goes into dangerous missions like his courting death. And he gets two bullets in one such task.
But of course, there's a twist in this kind of story. Suffice it to say that it turns out not to be the usual Sparks' material that requires weepers to consume a lot of tissue paper. Maybe because it's directed by Lasse Hallstrom, whose "My Life As a Dog" won the best foreign language film Oscar years ago and later got nominated again for his screen adaptation of "The Cider House Rules" and "Chocolat". It's still schmaltzy melodrama with some of the characters doing a lot of personal sacrifice for other characters, but done with more restraint. In the end, they even have a Star Cinema kind of conclusion where the concerned parties meet again after some years for the obligatory happy ending.
The first part of the movie showing how John and Savannah meet by chance and how their love story develops is pretty watchable. The second act becomes tedious and suffers from monotony showing them separated from each other exchanging correspondence by snail mail (they don't have email or cellphones), while we hear voice overs of what's going on in their respective lives. This is spiced up with montage shots accompanied by cheesy songs.
It perks up when John returns home after the bombing of the World Trade Center (the terrorists who did that are the real villains here) and they finally make love with each other in the barn, just like Piolo and Angel in "Love Me Again", but executed without eroticism. After that, it's back to boredom with the movie also focusing on John's relationship with his father (Richard Jenkins, who's quite touching here), a quiet, reclusive coin collector who compulsively bakes meatloaf on Saturdays and lasagna on Sundays.
The film is basically redeemed by the generally believable acting of the leads. We first saw Amanda Seyfried in the TV series "Big Love" where she already displayed fine emoting, and later in "Mamma Mia" where she held her own against Meryl Streep and in "Jennifer's Body" where she made mincemeat of Megan Fox. She gives a quiet but winning performance here as a young woman who has to make a crucial decision for the sake of an autistic boy and his sick dad (Henry Thomas, the former child actor in "E.T."). Channing Tatum won fans as a dancer in "Step Up" and as an action star in "G.I. Joe". Here, he manages to show that he can also do drama credibly as the heartbroken young soldier confused by his girlfriend's decisions, especially in his breakdown scene with his father at the hospital.
