Adrienne (Diane Lane), suddenly single, still reeling from the sudden separation from her philandering husband Jack (Christopher Meloni) and trying to raise two kids on her own, heads to her friend Jean’s (Viola Davis) ocean-side inn to watch over things for a couple of days. The only guest is another lost soul, Dr. Paul Flanner (Richard Gere), in town for a few days to meet with the husband (Scott Glenn) of a former patient who tragically died on his operating table.

Richard Gere and Diane Lane are together again in Warner Bros' Nights in Rodanthe

These two have nothing in common save for an intense need for some human compassion and kindness. For whatever reason, they are immediately attracted one to the other, the duo sparking an intense and intimate adult relationship allowing them to see their state of their lives with fresh eyes. With a hurricane beating down upon the hotel Adrienne and Paul find solace in the one place neither expected, salvation residing in the arms of the person staring at them from the other side of the candle-lit room.

I fully admit to dreading Nights in Rodanthe with every single solitary fiber of my entire being. While I think Gere and Lane are terrific together (their partnership going all the way back 24 years to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club), any film that bills itself as being from the writer of The Notebook starts at an immediate disadvantage. The truth of the matter is that I find that despicable 2004 romance to be one of the very worst motion pictures I have ever had the grave misfortune of viewing, and if its print suddenly dissolved in a vat of acid and all copies of the DVD mysteriously burst into flame I’d probable throw a party celebrating its destruction.

So imagine my happy surprise to find the first hour or so of this latest Nicholas Sparks’ adaptation to be shockingly worthwhile. The simple fact is, as long as the two actors are waltzing their way one round the other inside the hotel, this movie is a magnificently moving hit, the emotional crescendos so deliriously profound and wondrous I almost didn’t believe my eyes.

Too bad director George C. Wolfe (HBO’s Lackawanna Blues) and writers Ann Peacock (Kit Kittredge: An American Girl) and John Romano (Intolerable Cruelty) drop the ball so fantastically during the final act. In their collective zeal to stay as true as possible to the author’s original prose, the whole movie drowns in a series of putrid clichés and dramatic lunacies so schmaltzy I literally couldn’t believe I was witnessing them. This film doesn’t just fall apart, it collapses into teeny tine pieces so miniscule you couldn’t put them back together with a pair of magnetic tweezers and an electron microscope.

Pity, because until that point Wolfe had been well on his way to constructing one of the best older adult love stories to hit theaters since Clint and Meryl drove around in a dusty old pickup truck traveling through The Bridges of Madison County. There is a distinct honesty to the portraits Gere and Lane construct, a beautiful simplicity to their blossoming relationship that’s genuine and true. This is, for a while at least, quite possibly the best the two of them have ever been together, and their chemistry is even more intensely seductive and sensual than it was in Adrian Lyne’s 2002 infidelity potboiler Unfaithful.

Lane, in particular, shines like no tomorrow. Easily one of the most underrated actors of our time, the former Oscar-nominee makes Adrienne a complicated three-dimensional heroine I couldn’t help but root for. Even when the picture falls apart into increasingly infuriating histrionics and syrupy melodrama I still thought she was sensational, a scene of her crying over a poignant last letter so downright sensational it almost doesn’t matter that the scene itself is something of a pointlessly annoying cliché.

I must admit, I didn’t expect much from Night in Rodanthe, but when a movie captures my heart and mind the way this one did during its first couple of acts I can’t help but feel crushed when it falls apart. Lowered expectations or no, this film ended up having the potential to be something truly magnificent, it’s central love story as magical and timeless as any I could have cared to imagine. 

All of which makes the fact of its ultimate failure more than a bit disappointing. Like so many films of late (including both of this weekend’s other major releases Miracle at St. Anna and Eagle Eye) this one just can’t hold it together until the end, the feature nothing more than just another sad mediocrity impossible to care about. As love stories go, this one exasperatingly leads to nothing more insightful than a frustrated broken heart.

Film Rating: êê (out of 4)

Additional Links

-  Nights in Rodanthe Theatrical Trailer