Romance Sparks (as usual)
Latest treaclefest from The Notebook author tugs at the heartstrings, sticks to the formula
It’s the time of year when the sap rises, the syrup flows and the teardrops fall as another Nicholas Sparks novel morphs into a movie.
The Longest Ride is this year’s spring treaclefest. It matches Scott Eastwood’s Luke, a buff and steerstraddling North Carolina cowboy, with Britt Robertson’s Sophia, a brainy and fetching college gal from New Jersey.
He’s into rodeos, barbecue and “old school” manly ways; she’s into Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock and liberated female thinking. Could there be a more perfect romantic match?
Well, you’ve got to ask Rango, a seriously angry bull whom Luke is determined to ride to rodeo glory, even if it kills him — which it just might. The movie begins with Rango giving Luke a swift kick to the head, but Luke’s good with that miserable stack of sirloins. “This is what I do,” he tells Sophia. “It’s all I know.” The humans in this bizarre ménage à trois at least make a cute couple. Eastwood is the son of Clint, and looks distractedly like him, right down to that shy grin and “make my day” scowl. Robertson will soon be seen opposite George Clooney in the summer blockbuster Tomorrowland. She obviously knows how to handle Hollywood and domineering men.
But this wouldn’t be a proper Nicholas Sparks hearttugger without a parallel story loaded with tender flashbacks, benevolent elders and Hallmark sentiments.
This second romance, recalling the earlier Sparks weeper The Notebook, comes courtesy of Alan Alda’s lovable codger Ira, whom Luke and Sophia rescue after he crashes his car through a highway guardrail.
While Ira recuperates in hospital, he tells Sophia about the love of his life, Ruth, played by Oona Chaplin, Charlie’s granddaughter. Ruth adored art, too, and collected loads of what Luke will later dismiss as “squiggly lines on white canvas.” Ira’s memories flood back via a boxful of letters that he had in his car, which Sophia rescued along with him.
Ira and Ruth met and swooned in the 1940s, during the Second World War, a conflict that seriously affected their relationship and family dreams, as we learn. The younger Ira is played by Jack Huston, grandson of filmmaker John Huston, and he and Alda don’t look at all alike.
This is par for the course in a Nicholas Sparks movie. Why quibble over what your eyes see, when the heart is at stake?
The Longest Ride, by the way, is directed by George Tillman Jr., who has also made good and serious movies, such as Men of Honor and the criminally underseen The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete.
Here he’s content to just fit into the Sparks mould, shining an amber light and popping the questions. Can love conquer all? Can Luke tame Rango and lasso Sophia? Did Ira and Ruth work things out? And here’s one from me: Will this movie ever end? It runs a long128 minutes. You have to wade through not just puddles of tears, but also piles of BS.