Tearjerker on shaky foundations

Nights in Rodanthe (PG) 2 stars National release THE big kissing scene between Diane Lane and Richard Gere in Nights in Rodanthe, the latest of Nicholas Sparks's romantic novels to come to the screen, brings with it a sense of deja vu.

Diane Lane in a scene from Nights at Rodanthe

Nights in Rodanthe (PG) 2 stars National release THE big kissing scene between Diane Lane and Richard Gere in Nights in Rodanthe, the latest of Nicholas Sparks's romantic novels to come to the screen, brings with it a sense of deja vu.

After Unfaithful (2002) and, long before that, The Cotton Club (1984), the couple carry with them almost the same sense of a screen team as Tracy and Hepburn or Powell and Loy. Well, not really, but they do bring a certain gravitas to the sudsy schmaltz of this heavily contrived love story.

I never quite understood why the previous Sparks novel to come to the screen, The Notebook, was so successful, but its modest achievements soar in comparison with this film.

Lane plays Adrienne, whose husband Jack (Christopher Meloni) left her for another woman but wants to come back. Her children are keen on the idea but Adrienne isn't: once bitten, twice shy. While Jack looks after the kids, Adrienne looks after a sort of hotel constructed on a beach in North Carolina for a friend who is going away for a few days. The film loses whatever credibility it might have had the moment we see the hotel, a rickety-looking wooden structure built on sand and just waiting to be washed away in the first high tide (and, wouldn't you know, a hurricane is coming). This may have seemed terribly romantic on the printed page but when visualised it's just laughable. On top of that, the establishment's interior design is beyond hideous.

There's only one guest and that's soulful doctor Paul Flanner (Gere), who is bemoaning the fact that (a) his son (played, without the benefit of screen credit, by James Franco) has gone off to Ecuador to care for the impoverished, and (b) that he recently performed minor surgery on a woman who died on the operating table.

The widower (Scott Glenn) and his son live near the hotel and initially aren't pleased to see the man they blame for the death of their wife and mother. There's little more to be said about this except that, even by the modest standard of Hollywood tearjerkers, Nights in Rodanthe is pretty thin, and first-time feature film director George C. Wolfe (noted for his work in the theatre and on television) can add nothing of interest to the stale material.