Here’s an unfortunate realization: In the eight years I’ve been reviewing movies, I’ve now seen five films based on Nicholas Sparks novels. I only have vague memories of these movies. There’s the one where Miley Cyrus talks to a raccoon. There’s the one where Channing Tatum meets a guy with a coin collection. There’s the one where a ghost just shows up at the end of the movie (that one’s my favorite). It hardly matters what else happens in these movies since they’re all essentially the same. Some beefy guy from the wrong side of the tracks meets a woman and sets her free. One of them always has a past they’re running from, one that love will eventually overcome. If not that, then some beefy guy from the wrong side of the tracks meets a woman and screws everything up, only to overcome the odds as they end up together again. Or some mishmash of these things, all taking place in the South, all being infinitely cheesy.
The Best of Me is no different, with James Marsden playing the role of Dawson, our beefcake hero, a quiet, gentle, sensitive soul who’s beckoned back to the small town he grew up in after the death of his mentor, Tuck (Gerald McRaney). Also headed there for the same reason is Dawson’s old sweetheart, Amanda (Michelle Monaghan), who’s now married with a kid and wants little to do with Dawson. The reasons for this are unfurled through flashbacks to their high school days, where the only touch of accurate period detail is the occasional Spin Doctors song. Here, the affluent Amanda (Liana Liberato, If I Stay) and impoverished Dawson (Luke Bracey, The November Man), the son of a violent drug dealer (Sean Bridgers, Sweet Home Alabama), meet and fall for each other.
The plot unwinds as a means of explaining what happened to Dawson and Amanda’s perfect love, even in the face of Dawson’s white trash family and resistance from Amanda’s affluent father. The Best of Me is exactly as maudlin as one would expect from a Sparks adaptation, with its idealistic approach to love and romance. It gets even worse as the story catches up to the present day, and we meet Dawson’s brothers who exist as caricatures of poor white people, complete with cornrows and neck tattoos. Their sole purpose is to make sure something bad happens in the movie as soon as Dawson and Amanda start to rekindle their love. And when it happens, it’s pretty spectacularly ludicrous. I don’t want to give anything away (partly because the film’s big payoff scales the heights of ridiculousness), but the movie hits peak Sparksian mawkishness. What the “best of me” is actually referring to is far, far too silly to be believable, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t make the movie entertaining — at least in those closing moments. Rated PG-13 for sexuality, violence, some drug content and brief strong language.
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