I can tell you the exact moment Lasse Hallström’s Dear John dies on the screen: it happens right after the main characters’ everyday lives are disturbed by the events of 9/11. That scene in itself is quite nice, with dread casually (and surprisingly) enveloping the screen in our generation’s “where were you when JFK was shot?” moment.
But a minute or so later, it’s business as usual, and we realize that the film has invoked 9/11 as a minor plot point: it re-enforces patriotism in soldier John Tyree (Channing Tatum), who signs up for deployment and leaves girlfriend Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried) yearning.
This is the moment Dear John dies, not because the 9/11 use is purely exploitative (though you could certainly perceive it that way), but because it overshadows – and puts into perspective – everything else that happens in this Nicholas Sparks romance.
Nicholas Sparks. The writer of Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe. I sense a trend here, not necessarily in the Sparks’ source novels, which I haven’t read, but in the Hollywood adaptations: they’re all manipulative weepers in the vein of Love Story, with endings that no longer surprise. Dear John is a little different, but only in the details: the schmaltz is poured on even thicker, to even less effect.
That’s a shame, because there’s one aspect of the film that, manipulative and schmaltzy as it is, really works: the relationship between John and his father (Richard Jenkins), who seems to suffer from some form of (undiagnosed?) autism.
The scenes are unexpected and surprisingly touching – not that Hallström isn’t pulling out all the stops; the only thing missing is Harry Chapin’s Cat’s in the Cradle on the soundtrack – and will leave most audiences reaching for the tissues.
But the father-son stuff is just a subplot. The main thrust of Dear John is boy meets girl (via standard ‘meet cute’, this time involving a drowning handbag and a hunky diver), boy and girl fall in love, and boy goes to war. We’ve seen it all before; there are only a few directions this story could go in, and only one for a film based on a Nicholas Sparks novel.
The opening works well enough, as does the ending in its own schmaltzy way, but the scenes where the young couple are apart (the title, of course, comes from the letters Savannah sends John while he’s away) bring the film to a screeching halt. War is a montage here, and Savannah is little more than a background character throughout much of the second half.
Lasse Hallström is typically a reliable director (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Cider House Rules), but too often prone to sentimentality; the source material is not a good fit here, and too often the film is pushed over the line into – not forgetting the use of 9/11 – trite melodrama.
Otherwise, Hallström’s film is tightly directed and perfectly watchable, with two attractive and likable leads in Tatum and Seyfried, who I think are better actors than their resumes might indicate. Here’s hoping for better things from all involved.
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