Aubrey MaloneThe Longest Ride (12A)
Some people are clamouring for a cull on movie adaptations of Nicholas Sparks books – there have been 11 so far – calling them ‘samey and soppy’. Are they right? To an extent yes, but there’s also a lot to be savoured in them if we overlook the schmaltzy overlay.
In The Longest Ride, we get a pair of intertwined love stories spanning separate eras, something Sparks seems to specialise in. Shades of The Bridges of Madison County then? For sure, and if we factor in the fact that the film’s male lead, Luke, is played by Scott Eastwood, Clint’s son, the comparison becomes even more strident.
There are usually more coincidences in a Sparks adaptation than a Henry James novel and this is no exception. Thus when Luke and art student Sophia (Britt Robertson) are coming home from a date one night and happen upon a car accident, who should be in the car but Ira Levinson (Alan Alda), the widower of another art lover, Ruth (Oona Chaplin).
Ira and Ruth were passionately in love with one another in their youth but, after they got married, Ira became injured in World War II and he was unable to have children. Ruth was devastated. The marriage looked set to falter but then Ira put all his energies into indulging Ruth’s devotion to art and they carved out a different kind of happiness to that of having a family.
The relationship between Luke and Sophia is problematic for a different reason. Sophia has her sights set on a career in art whereas Luke, who rides bulls for a living, regards anything on an easel as a waste of time. Will Luke, like Ira, get an ‘art’ attack and give up the bull riding? He’s advised to by doctors as one too many falls (why does he always get the fiercest bulls?) has meant his health is in bits.
It’s all played out with the easy contrivance we’ve come to expect from Sparks adaptations. The emotions are cotton candy, the camerawork picture postcard style and the plot sophistication about the level of a Mills & Boon penny dreadful. (There are also an incredible number of product endorsements in the film, it should be said, which increase its commercial overtones.)
You won’t need as many Kleenex for The Longest Ride as some of the more recent films based on Sparks’ novels but it still rates pretty high on the Richter Scale of syrupiness. It’s saved by a sterling performance by Robertson, a young lady who manages to invest even the most ordinary line of dialogue with interest due to her large array of expressions and intonations.
Alan Alda also does everything that is expected of him as the elder Ira reminiscing on his great love for Ruth. The main action consists of the young Ira and Ruth living their life, interspersed with scenes of Alda reading old love letters to Sophia from his hospital bed while she tosses up between the higher echelons of art and a life down on the farm with our soft-spoken cowpoke.
It all adds up to a slickly packaged parable about the importance of self-sacrifice as two men from successive generations come to realise faint heart never won fair lady.
If you’re looking for anything more nuanced you should head for the next multiplex.
Good: ***