Miley’s Song Has a Deathly Chorus
Recent High School graduate and piano prodigy Ronnie Miller (Miley Cyrus) and her little brother Jonah (Bobby Coleman) are forced by their mother Kim (Kelly Preston) to spend the summer with their reclusive father Steve (Greg Kinnear) at his beach house. While the younger child is ecstatic about this turn of event, his older sister isn’t so enthusiastic, the teenager still unable to forgive him for ending his marriage to their mother and to her way of thinking walking out on the lot of them.
Miley Cyrus and Greg Kinnear in Touchstone Pictures' The Last Song
After meeting hunky local Will Blakelee (Liam Hemsworth) Ronnie’s heart and her hurt begin to thaw, the young woman beginning to open up to the idea that this might not have been such a bad idea after all. But not everything is as it seems, both her new beau and her loving father having secrets that will test her metal like nothing else has before. Ronnie finds herself at a crossroads, her present choices going to have a lasting impact that will likely set the course for the remainder of her future life.
Here’s the thing about The Last Song. As the movie is based on a novel by Nicolas Sparks (who coincidentally co-wrote the screenplay with Jeff Van Wie) you know going in someone is going to die. Having not read the source material I was oddly more concerned with trying to figure out who that unlucky soul was going to be and after about thirty minutes or so I had that mystery pretty much pegged, not really caring a lick if Ronnie found love or if Steven could get himself back into his daughter’s good graces.
Not that the central narrative is worth that much attention in the first place. Both the love story and familial melodramas are pretty pedestrian, the whole thing playing like Douglas Sirk-inspired clockwork working with such cliché precision it’s actually kind of impressive. Director Julie Anne Robinson (making the jump from television to the big screen) handles everything with a relatively perfunctory sincerity, not so much telegraphing all of Spark’s twists and turns so much as not doing a darn thing to hide any of them.
All of which makes the movie fine as a middle of the afternoon fodder for Cable but as a theatrical experience as relatively decently as everything is done it’s just not worth the price of admission. Cyrus, while better than I expected her to be, just isn’t a good enough actress to hold a viewer’s attention for a full 107 minutes. She retreats far too often into sitcom level emoting, channeling her Hannah Montana alter ego when she should be going for the full Rachel McAdams or Kristen Stewart pout.
Still, she and Hemsworth have a decent amount of chemistry, while Kinnear does a good job of elevating his costar to a dramatic level she maybe otherwise would not have obtained. The first half of the film is hardly as maudlin or as distasteful as previous Sparks adaptations like The Notebook or Message in a Bottle, and for a while there I was sitting in my seat actually kind of enjoying myself.
But once the deathly reveal is made things sadly come to an inert halt and any chance there was I was going to exit the theatre somewhat pleasantly surprised were erased in an instant. The last half hour or so moves with the urgency of a sea turtle crawling its way to the ocean, the climax seeming to take an absolute eternity to make its presence known thanks to the mawkish emotional nonsense surrounding it.
Movies about death are perfectly okay in my book. Terms of Endearment works so well because its final moments are achieved elegantly and honestly, and even if the viewer knows they’re being manipulated to tears because the emotions ring true most find themselves perfectly okay with that. The problem with these Sparks adaptations is that nothing about them feels honest, their dances with death feeling like pure emotional manipulation just for the sake of emotional manipulation.
That’s the case here with The Last Song. I didn’t believe Ronnie’s choices mainly because I didn’t believe the situation the screenplay had her ensconced within. Her story was ultimately one that didn’t move me one way or the other, and while many around me drowned their sorrows in handfuls of Kleenex I silently sat there stewing in my own boredom.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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