Nights in Rodanthe (Blu-ray)

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---

Can one weekend change a life? Can Blu-ray high definition save a movie? Yes and no. Yes to the first question, no to the second.

Diane Lane and Richard Gere worked so well together in 2002's "Unfaithful" that Warner Bros. decided to pair them up in 2008's "Nights in Rodanthe." The actors once again work well together, but they should have quit when they were ahead. This time out they haven't got the script to go with their talents.

Director George C. Wolfe made his big-screen directorial debut with "Nights in Rodanthe" after success as a Broadway producer-director and doing several television productions. Screenwriters Ann Peacock and John Romano based their screenplay for the movie on a novel by best-selling author Nicholas Sparks, who previously provided Hollywood with "Message in a Bottle," "A Walk to Remember," and "The Notebook." One has to wonder if anyone besides Sparks is still writing romance novels or if Hollywood is looking to any other author for romantic material.

Lane plays a divorced woman, Adrienne Willis, with a teenaged daughter and a ten-year-old son. Her ex-husband, Jack (Christopher Meloni), wants to get back together with her, but Adrienne cannot forgive his infidelity. She has devoted her life to her husband and children and now feels betrayed by his unfaithfulness. To compound matters, her daughter hates her for not allowing the father to return to the fold, and the son finds himself bewildered by it all.

Gere plays Dr. Paul Flanner, a divorced surgeon who has even more problems than Adrienne. He always put his career ahead of his family, one of his female patients accidentally died in a surgery he was performing on her, he's being sued by the woman's husband (Scott Glenn), his wife has left him, and his grown son (James Franco), also a doctor, hates him. Whew!

Coincidentally, both Adrienne and Paul wind up in the same isolated inn together in Rodanthe, a small town on the North Carolina coast. She is taking care of the inn for a friend (Viola Davis), and at the moment Paul is the only guest.

Misery loves comfort, I suppose, because Adrienne and Paul quickly find they have a lot in common in terms of personal issues and just as quickly fall into one another's arms.

Frankly, that's about it, except for the ending, which I'll get to in a moment. The story moves along like a two-person filmed stage play. Lane and Gere are in practically every scene together after the initial exposition, and there is only so much a viewer can stand of their empty talk. This is Nicholas Sparks, after all, not Eugene O'Neill, and it's "Nights in Rodanthe," not "Long Day's Journey into Night." So we can see what's coming at least two hankies ahead of time.

Yes, it's good to see a straight romantic movie that involves mature people for a change instead of endless, witless romantic comedies about twenty-year-olds. But a good romance has to have substance, too, or there's not a lot of reason for it beyond fulfilling some basic need for potboilers. Here, we get a man who loves Dinah Washington songs, a woman with an old phonograph and even older LPs, and a fairy-tale inn that looks like something out of "Lemony Snicket." It's that kind of movie.

To punctuate the couple's dilemmas, the author throws in a hurricane, which seems severe enough to have blown the whole house down but doesn't. From there, the story gets increasingly passionate, melodramatic, and, finally, maudlin.

The "finally" is the ending, which makes you go "Ah, come on!" It is as unlikely an event as you'll ever come across, and the author clearly intended it only as a manipulative plot device. If the rest of the film simply bores you, the ending will infuriate you. Come on, Sparks; you're better than that.