Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
The Best of Me
Movies based on Nicholas Sparks novels often seem assembled like magnetic poetry: Sparks or the screenwriters credited with bringing his myopic visions to the screen seem not to write in a way that’s observant of the way people actually behave.
Stick a pair of unconvincingly virtuous characters against a setting south of the Mason-Dixon line. Place socioeconomic obsta-
cles on their path to love and be sure to have key characters die in horrible ways. Once you’ve named the characters, you have a Nicholas Sparks romance.
Be sure to vary the formulas as little as possible. You don’t want to make the Stephen King mistake. Don’t be so creative as to include a homicidal car in one tale and a rabid St. Bernard in another.
The latest big- screen weeper from one of Sparks’ novels, The Best of Me, con- cerns a 30-something paralegal named Amanda ( Michelle Monaghan) and an oil rig worker named Dawson (James Marsden). After 20 years apart, the two wind up returning to the Louisiana town where they grew up. An old codger named Tuck (Gerald McRaney) who befriended the two when they were teens (Liana Liberato, Luke Bracey) has left the thwarted lovers some of his property.
It’s no secret that the old man has set out to reunite the two from the grave, and that keeps the script by J. Mills Goodloe and Will Fetters from building any momentum. Despite being played by two different actors each, Amanda and Dawson never really grow or change, so while their romance is pretty to look at (Louisiana can be scenic), it’s free of any sense of excitement or empathy for the characters.
Michael Bay’s Transformers have more believable human emotions.
As if viewers might ever doubt that Dawson is a good guy, he doesn’t simply work on the rig. When an explosion happens, he also heroically saves some co-workers, winds up in a coma and only after the fact learns of his valor. It’s as if director Michael Hoffman, Sparks or someone else involved thought that viewers were so dim that Dawson’s strengths had to be advertised or magnified. This process results in more giggles than feelings of awe.
At just shy of two hours, The Best of Me moves from flashbacks to the present and back slowly. With his magnetic plot points and stock characters, one wonders if Hoffman could have fit two or three Sparks novels into the same running time. Maybe he has, because they are impossible to tell apart.