Movie Review: Nights in Rodanthe

Summary: Sparks (A Bend in the Road, etc.) logs more miles on the winding high road of romance with the story of two middle-aged people who meet by chance in the small North Carolina coastal town of Rodanthe. The impassioned but doomed romance seems to owe much to Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County. Once again, a housewife who has focused on everyone but herself indulges in a brief, intense, secret affair with a stranger who changes her life forever. As the story begins, Adrienne Willis is 60, the divorced mother of three grown children. To help her troubled daughter cope with the untimely recent death of her husband, Adrienne tells her the tale of her love affair, which took place 15 years before. At the time, Adrienne was an uptight matron whose ex-husband had just left her for a younger woman. This rejection colors her entire life, and Sparks realistically portrays a vulnerable and isolated woman who throws herself into raising her children to escape her despair. Paul Flanner, her paramour, is a surgeon and an obsessive workaholic with no genuine connection to his wife or son, whose world completely falls apart when one of his patients inexplicably dies. ~ book summary on amazon.com

Review: I will start by saying that I did not read the book Nights in Rodanthe but I didn't read The Notebook or A Walk to Remember and I loved those movies. I honestly can't say that Nights in Rodanthe will be held in the same esteem. I enjoy both Richard Gere and Diane Lane and thought they were believable in their roles as Paul and Adrienne, but the story was so incredibly forced. I mean you knew what was coming a mile away and yet I somehow had to watch the entire movie. I guess I stayed tuned in to see if I would be shocked by some twist I didn't see coming. There wasn't.

My sister did read the book and loved it. It was her first foray into Nicholas Sparks and she's pretty much read all of his books. I think she might be disappointed in this adaptation, so I told her to skip it. I can tell that even from the book summary that it was changed. I mean unless I really missed something, it wasn't told as an older woman looking back, it was in the here and now. I think it might have come off better if it was told in past tense.

I always enjoy seeing Chris Meloni outside of Law & Order:SVU, but why does he always play the jerk and/or the jerk ex-husband? Just curious. The scenery was beautiful and I wonder if that really is an inn in North Carolina or if that was a set? Probably something I'll never know.

So if you are in the mood for a good romantic film, skip Nights in Rodanthe and watch A Walk to Remember or The Notebook instead.

Final Take: 2/5