Forget about “Nights in Rodanthe.” I couldn’t even stand 97 minutes there.
As an even more patronizing insult to the female target audience than this month’s pandering “The Women,” today’s romance melodrama may boast fancy production values and the likes of Richard Gere, Diane Lane and James Franco in it. But it delivers such affected theatrics, mechanical love scenes, soapy plotting, and eye-rolling corn, it makes the previous Nicholas Sparks novel adaptations “Message in a Bottle” and “The Notebook” — heck, even a Lifetime movie — seem positively edgy by comparison.
If you insist on going, plan to see it only as real estate porn. Because if your lusts run toward Architectural Digest, the main digs here would make for a doozy of a centerfold. But sadly, the fabulously designed beachside bed-and-breakfast on display showed more life than the actors. The story’s big turning point is an approaching hurricane. And personally, I felt infinitely more emotion over the potential destruction of that magnificent house than I ever did about the predictably doomed fate of middle-aged paramours Adrienne Willis (Lane) and Dr. Paul Flanner (Gere).
She’s a soon-to-be divorcee. He’s having a career crisis. They meet and, of course, find life-transforming healing for their respective problems in each other’s arms. But first, Nature will have to take her course all over the North Carolina coast.
Never mind the deadly pacing. The narrative detail and dialogue lines are so trite; it pains me to even recall them long enough to particularize them in this review. I certainly wouldn’t want to put you through it. Suffice it to say that director George C. Wolfe and screenwriters Ann Peacock and John Romano reduce the already questionable Sparks oeuvre to new depths of insufferable chick-flick purgatory.
Consistent thespians James Franco and Scott Glenn are each given small, thankless roles. But it is the wasted use of Lane and Gere that really rankles. Both of them, together and separately, have been most compelling for all these years when they have gotten to be sensual beings on screen. The co-stars of “Cotton Club” and “Unfaithful” had a proven chemistry and yet filmmaker Wolfe manages to neuter them anyway.
So, in dashing our high expectations for their repairing and for making what turned out be an extravagant piece of junk, the folks behind “Nights” should find new day jobs.
Quick info
“Nights in Rodanthe”
1 out of 5 Stars
Stars: Richard Gere, Diane Lane, James Franco
Director: George C. Wolfe
Rated PG-13 for some sensuality
Running Time: 97 minutes
