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A
Walk to Remember
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Weepies worthy of the name are a rare, endangered species in modern cinema. Hip critics and directors have learnt to love what they have rehabilitated as melodrama, particularly if it harbours radical views on issues of family, class, race and gender. But old-fashioned, less intellectually ambitious films about young love and fatal diseases are a test for contemporary audiences. The audience I sat with laughed rather cruelly at A Walk to Remember, adapted from Nicholas Sparks' novel. It is the sort of movie one does not expect to see anymore beyond the safe, quarantined confines of daytime television. Landon (Shane West) is a troubled young man who rides with the wrong crowd. Woe is Landon when he begins falling for the class dag, Jamie (Mandy Moore), who not only dresses badly and belongs to the school's drama club, but also emulates the strict religious beliefs of her Reverend father (Peter Coyote), a Baptist minister. For a while Landon, like John Travolta in Grease (1978), is content to humiliate Jamie to appease his groovy friends. But when he is inducted into the school play after committing a serious misdemeanour, his complicity with her grows. Jamie, meanwhile, discovers the thrill in moving ever-so-slightly away from her father's stern code. There is a secret, mid-way twist in this plot that is designed to cue a flood of tears. Suffice to say, the revelation prompts Landon to want to make all of Jamie's young dreams come true in a heck of a hurry. At the movie's high point, he even custom-builds her an enormous, uncomfortably phallic-looking telescope. This is the closest A Walk to Remember gets to anything even remotely rude or vulgar. It is an ethereal, well-mannered piece of work, in the tradition of those strange Christian Slater romances Untamed Heart (1993) and Bed of Roses (1996). Director Adam Shankman (The Wedding Planner, 2001) gives it all a golden glow, and the young actors (especially Moore) are very appealing. MORE Shankman: The Pacifier © Adrian Martin June 2002 |
