A SWEET TRIP
Alan Alda lends a touch of class to “The Longest Ride,” while Scott Eastwood (Clint’s 29-year-old lookalike son) provides the sex appeal and virility — he’s a competitive bull rider, for heaven’s sake.
“The Longest Ride” is the 10th movie based on a Nicholas Sparks’ novel and while it’s not the best of the bunch, it is a vast improvement over some of the previous adaptations, which took the same tearstained paths. It tells the story of two couples whose lives intersect.
First up: Sophia (Britt Robertson), a Wake Forest University senior who is anticipating a dream summer internship at a New York art gallery, and Luke (Mr. Eastwood), who is struggling to come back after being bounced and bucked off a fast and furious bull the previous year. A sorority sister twists Sophia’s arm to go to a rodeo, promising “the hottest guys you have ever seen.”
The cowboy is among them and everything about their later first date is unconventional, from the picturesque picnic Luke arranges to the accident he spots on the way back. An auto has smashed through a guardrail and into a tree and caught fire, but Luke is able to rescue the driver, Ira (Alan Alda), while Sophia complies with his dazed request to grab a box from
the car.
It holds Ira’s love letters to his wife and as Sophia reads them to the hospitalized Ira, the story toggles between the past of young Ira (Jack Huston) and Ruth (Oona Chaplin) and the steamy romance between the art student and the bull rider.
In 1940, a youthful Ira was working in his father’s clothing store in North Carolina, which is where Ruth and her Jewish parents settled after fleeing their cultured world in Vienna, coincidentally dramatized in “Woman in Gold” opening today. They fall in love but their life together doesn’t go exactly as imagined.
In the present day, Sophia and Luke face a looming long-distance relationship along with the fact she doesn’t fit easily into his world and he, especially, into hers. Their struggle is set against the one which Ira and Ruth faced, a variation on the standard Sparks formula in which something conspires to keep soulmates apart.
As usual, the actors are handsome, the countryside beautiful and the probability of some sort of fairy-tale ending high. You may see this one coming, although exactly how it happens comes in a small twist that is faithful to the novel and then embellished.
Mr. Eastwood, who looks like a ripped “Rawhide” version of Clint, comfortably handles the role of the laconic rider although stunt doubles climbed atop the bulls spitting strings of saliva and twisting, jolting and leaping into the air. Mr. Alda lends a wistful, elegant note to the story with Ms. Chaplin injecting energy and Ms. Robertson a pretty stand-in for sincere, smart college girls everywhere.
“The Longest Ride,” directed by George Tillman Jr. (“Soul Food,” “Men of Honor”), is safe, sweet, predictable entertainment with reminders that love often means sacrifice, and that happiness can come from focusing on what you have rather than what you lack. Nothing you haven’t heard before or read in a greeting card but bundled into a palatable, PG-13 package.