Movie Review: 'The Longest Ride'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Nine and counting. That's how many best-selling novels by Nicholas Sparks have been adapted into romantic dramas for the movie screen.
It started with Message in a Bottle (1999), then A Walk to Remember (2002), The Notebook (2002), Nights in Rodanthe (2008), Dear John (2010), The Last Song (2010), The Lucky One (2012), Safe Haven (2013), and, most recently, The Best of Me (2014).
Hey, when the formula has people asking for more and showing up, keep applying it. That means feature a reliable and relatable package of mismatched lovers, tragic obstacles, and love-conquers-all schmaltz.
The Longest Ride makes it ten. And it's among the better efforts in the "franchise" despite a bizarre, out-of-left-field ending.
It tells the tale of sparks flying at the beginning of a star-crossed love affair between a former rodeo champ and a Wake Forest senior.
Brett Robertson plays undergrad about-to-grad Sophia, who has managed to land an internship at a prestigious Manhattan art gallery.
In North Carolina, she meets Luke, played by Scott Eastwood (yep, the youngest son of Clint), who is attempting a comeback as a bull rider.
After an automobile accident, the young couple come to the rescue of Ira Levinson, a widower played by Alan Alda, whose car went through a guard rail. It turns out he was married to Ruth (Oona Chaplin) for decades and now, eight years after her death, the box of love letters he sent her in the 1940s are his most prized possession, which they rescue from his burning car.
While he recuperates in the hospital, Ira shares with them his abiding memories of the love-of-his-life romance with Ruth.that started when he was a young man (Jack Huston), Sophia visits him and reads him the letters that Ruth sent him all those years ago.
Some viewers will find the flashback-delivered saga of the past more dramatic and vital and interesting and poignant than the contemporary drama, but the disparity isn't overwhelming.
Director George Tillman, Jr. (Soul Food, Men of Honor, Notorious, Faster) applies the Sparks formula in a way that will probably please Sparks devotees while providing detractors with evidence of the too-much-ness of it all.
The screenplay, adapted from the Sparks novel of the same name by Craig Bolotin, explores long-term love, with its inevitable demands in terms of compromise and sacrifice, by offering two examples of it for the price of one.
But the film's major contribution to the movie landscape may well be the introduction of four promising, young, competent, and relatively unfamiliar actors – three of whom are relatives of major movie icons – to movie audiences. Eastwood, Robertson, Chaplin (granddaughter of Charlie), and Huston (grandson of John) should be around for quite some time.
So we'll romance 2-1/2 stars out of 4 for a pair of intertwining love stories, The Longest Ride. For incurable romantics, call it another episode of Sparks and recreation.
