'Dear John': Letters to Nowhere

The pace of the story of “Dear John” shifts and varies. Sometimes it ambles. Other times it meanders.

Surprisingly, the picture starts out strong, with a sun-dappled romance on the beaches of South Carolina. An earnest young man meets a good-hearted young woman and they fall in love against a golden backdrop of full moons and first kisses in the rain. Theirs is the kind of romance that makes women in the audience sigh while the men wonder if Peyton Manning really is that good or if he just benefits from an unusually powerful and well-disciplined offensive line (hint: He really is that good).

It’s a chick flick absolutely, but at least it is well made, at first, with honeyed photography and cunning dialogue that reveals the two lovers’ growing relationship.

But their time together is destined to be brief, and not just because the film is based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. She is a college student who has to return to school, and he is a soldier who must go back to do vague and undefined special-ops things overseas. But they promise to write each other every day.

And that is where our interest begins to dwindle. Problem No. 1 is that having two actors endlessly read letters back and forth is never cinematically satisfying, particularly when the letters are as mundane as these. Problem No. 2 is that the film doesn’t seem to know where it is going and it certainly doesn’t know where to end. And Problem No. 3 is that one of the lovers, the earnest young soldier, is played by Channing Tatum.

Tatum looks like a chiseled piece of marble, and unfortunately he acts like one, too. If he knows how to give inflection to his words, any inflection at all, he keeps that knowledge a well-hidden secret.

Tatum’s opposite in the film is Amanda Seyfried, who will never be confused with Meryl Streep (who played her mother in “Mamma Mia”), but she is appealing enough in the dewy-eyed, romantic part of her role. It helps that Seyfried is unconventionally beautiful, with the face of a Botticelli by way of Modigliani.

The director is Lasse Hallstrom, which may explain why the romance scenes are so effective (Hallstrom’s many fine movies include “Chocolat”). But he never quite finds the movie’s handle, and it appears possible that, despite the popularity of the original novel, there may be no handle to find.

Writer Jamie Linden also gets the romance right, but little else. His story lacks cohesion. It spends so much time on what appears to be unrelated tangents that we know the tangents will eventually become the point of the film. This tactic of feinting in one direction before taking the story off in a different one is probably supposed to be a twist, but it feels more like a bait and switch.

Eventually, with so little happening so much of the time, we just get tired of it all. Our interest wanes, and even the most romantic-minded people in the audience start thinking about football. When, after many false starts, the movie finally comes to an end, we check our watches and are surprised to learn that it didn’t last much, much longer.


(Note: This review originally ran on www.boomerlifemagazine.com)