The Sparks Oeuvre: Nights in Rodanthe (movie)

 

Tagline: It's never too late for a second chance. 

IMDb description: A doctor, who is travelling to see his estranged son, sparks with an unhappily married woman at a North Carolina inn. 

Roger Ebert review: one and a half stars ("A Leaky Weeper" is the title of a truly great review)

Male protagonist: Dr. Paul Flanner (Richard Gere)

Female protagonist: Adrienne Willis (Diane Lane)

Star supporting cast: Viola Davis as Adrienne's best friend; Christopher Meloni as Adrienne's cheating husband; uncredited James Franco as Paul's son; Mae Whitman as Adrienne's daughter

Background: Gere and Lane starred together as married couple in 2002's Unfaithful, the Adrian Lyne sexy thriller that earned Lane an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. That same year, Nights in Rodanthe was published, and made it's way to this adaptation in 2008. As the fourth Sparks movie adaptation (and fourth adaption!), it's the first to nearly completely miss the mark. 

For the most part, the story from the novel is the same. However, for the first time in the Oeuvre, the changes that were made for the screen feel detrimental to the film. The biggest change, for me, is the update in Adrienne's marital status. In the novel, she's been divorced for three years, but in the movie she's just separated from her cheating husband. Separated is still married, and I just don't like that this means Adrienne is technically cheating. This change effectively removes the lovely arc in the book of Adrienne and Paul both having the new versions of themselves post-divorce be discovered and loved by someone else. 

The book uses the Sparks-loved device of flashback to tell the story. None of the adaptations have kept this device (except, of course, The Notebook, as it's actually integral to the story) and this is the first time where I felt like it was actually needed. Without it, we lose all sense of Adrienne's journey. We lose the scope. We lose meaning in her choices and the way she has learned to live with the loss. None of it translates with the shortened time frame of the film. 

 Nights in Rodanthe underscores how important the director is in making a Sparks adaption really work. Director George C Wolfe has a great cast, but he mostly squanders it. Gere and Lane were great as a married couple in Unfaithful, and they do their best here but are saddled with a bad script and very bad staging. Wolfe bizarrely stages a dinner scene between the two where I was sure Gere wasn't actually there and Lane was acting against a stand-in; then he frames them each against a yellow wall in medium close-ups and it looks so very bad. He can't direct a proper kissing scene, as I was sure Paul was going to devour Adrienne's face. The visual effects are terrible, and the post hurricane scenes are laughable when their intent is to be tragic.  

This adaptation felt distinctly like most involved did not understand the essence of the book, and just wanted to cash in on the popularity of the last Sparks adaptation, The Notebook; at this point in the timeline of the Sparks Oeuvre it's become the standard and created/enforced the shorthand we know today as "a Nicholas Sparks movie." Unfortunately, it takes more than attractive actors to make a good Sparks adaption.