By Linda Winsh-Bolard
Adrienne Wills (Diane Lane) promised to help out her friend Jean with her beach Inn on the weekend when her separated husbands is having the kids. Before she can leave, he corners her with a speech along the lines:”I want to come home”, having apparently forgotten that anything
went wrong.
Adrienne is upset by the time she manages to leave. Jean (Viola Davis) gives her mass of advice on how to deal with the old building, and a warning that a storm might be coming. Before it comes, the only booked guest, Dr. Paul Flanner (Richard Gere), arrives.
Paul had come to speak to Robert Torrelson (Glenn Scott) whose wife died on his operating table during routine procedure.
Both, Adrienne and Paul, have a lot to sort out, neither is looking for additional problems that a romance will bring, but neither will resist given the circumstances that include, among many other things, a storm of biblical proportions and manipulating, conniving husband.
First lets mention, yet again, what an incredibly good pair of actors Gere and Lane are, and they are vibrantly good in this grown up, not quite what you’d expect, romance where they carry all the weight. They are so good that you expect the film to be more than it is.
The same praise goes to the sassy, beautiful, and ever so ladylike woman, Viola Davis. Scott Glen managed the impossible task of his part not to sink to hysteria, pleading or melodrama very admirably.
Visually it makes the most of the sets, the seaside and the beauty of the land. It is so carefully staged that some of it might be a moving photograph. It also gives a warning: realism is not what this is all about.
It has ideas to pass on, and some of them are newer than you’d expect, but it carries the heavy load of studio’s expectation for a “women film”, worse yet, a film for grown up women, who, in the expectations of middle aged studio executives, desire for romance lost to them forever and nothing else. Wrong. The battle between the message the film tries to push though, and the slow moving love story on isolated island is
almost painful to watch. The studio won, and the film is therefore somewhat flat, full of platitudes, teary and way too long.
Most of that could have been fixed in the editing room. A bit more of the bitterly cutting dialog would have also helped. The actors would have carried all that with grace and we might have had a truly good grown up film.
Ditch the clichés and the melodrama, develop real human characters, tough and scared as well as scarred , and you might be surprised how good it gets.
Yet, Hollywood lacks understanding that successes of films such as the English Patient lie partly in grown up partners, both of them, neither sentimental, neither a willing victim, or a crybaby simpleton. Of course, the idea
of female power is frightening to many. Yet, there are generations of very real women who always did as expected, ended with nothing, and brought up their kids, male and female, to follow pattern that is devastating
for them personally, as well as for the society at large. Tackle this and you’ll have an Oscar winning picture.
George C. Wolfe came from television where he also has a respectable acting career; this is his first feature film. He suffers from a habit of shooting the stage, opera and plays, which he did well, but film is a different animal. The screenplay is based on novel by Nicholas Sparks, author of The Notebook and Message in the Bottle, and written by Anne Peacock and John Romano. Cinematography by Affonso Beatto.
I have no idea if a building like the one shown in the film exists, but Rodathe, NC does, it is one among the Outer Banks islands, there is a connecting bridge spanning the bay and wild horses as well. It is prohibitively expensive.
