Lasse Hallstrom’s “Dear John” tells the heartbreaking story of two young people who fail to find happiness together because they’re trapped in an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel.
Their romance leads to bittersweet loss. If a Sparks story ended in happiness, the characters might be disappointed. They seem to have their noble, resigned dialogue already written.
Channing Tatum stars as John Tyree, a handsome Army Special Forces specialist home on two weeks’ leave at the South Carolina shore. Amanda Seyfried plays Savannah, an ethereal beauty whose purse falls off a pier. John dives in and retrieves it. In the few precious days they share, they fall deeply into PG-13 love.
John was raised by his father (Richard Jenkins), a quiet man who wears white gloves while admiring his coin collection, and cooks chicken every Saturday and lasagna every Sunday.
Savannah meets him and casually observes to John that he is autistic — a mild case, she gently suggests. John is angered by this insult.
Did he never, by the age of 22, observe that his father was strangely mannered? Did no one else? Did the movie mention any employment history for Mr. Tyree? I could have missed it.
In a Sparks story, as we know from “The Notebook,” problems like autism and Alzheimer’s are never seen in their tragic stages but always allow the good souls of their victims to visibly glow. Diseases don’t destroy and kill but exist primarily to inspire admirable conduct by nexts of kin. John and Savannah get over his unhappiness, and he pledges that he’ll be back at the end of 12 months so they can wed.
But then 9/11 happens, and like every man in his group, he re-enlists. And continues to re-enlist until the movie’s title hints at what he receives in the mail.
Because Savannah is a true blue heroine, her new love is of course a nice and decent man, someone John can accept, so that we can smile sadly and not get all messy and depressed. That’s the note Sparks aims for: the sad smile.
John and Savannah are awfully nice. She comes from a rich family who have a mansion, and John and his dad live in a humble but cozy frame house that in its South Carolina island location might easily be purchased for less than $500,000.
“Dear John” exists only to coddle the sentiments of undemanding dreamers, and plunge us into a world where the only evil is the interruption of the good.
Of course John is overseas on a series of missions so secret that Savannah cannot be told where, exactly, he is. In the years after 9/11, where, oh where, could he be? Apparently not in Iraq or Afghanistan, because it can hardly be a military secret that the men of Special Forces are deployed there.
But somewhere, anyway, and he re-enlists for a good chunk of her early childbearing years.
It matters not. In this movie, war is a plot device. It loosens its grip on John only long enough to sporadically renew his romance, before claiming him again so that we finally consider Savannah’s Dear John letter just good common sense.
“Dear John”
PG-13 for some sensuality and violence. 1 hour, 48 minutes. Directed by Lasse Hallström; starring Channing Tatum, Amanda Seyfried, Henry Thomas, Richard Jenkins, and Keith Robinson. Opens today at area theaters.
