Dear John

Directed by Lasse Hallstrom

Runtime: 105 min.

Dear John could be The Hurt Locker of romantic movies when Green Beret Staff Sergeant John Tyree (Channing Tatum) loses his stateside girlfriend Savannah (Amanda Seyfried) while serving his country in Iraq. The film has little feeling for military experience, or the sense of patriotic duty that John enunciates during the opening narration: “I am a coin in the United States Army. My edges have been rimmed and beveled. I have two [bullet] holes in me, so I’m no longer in perfect condition.”

John’s reference to coins and wounds makes a trenchant metaphor for his humble sense of sacrifice and exploitation. As one young man among millions, he takes a thankless military commission that many civilians presume is ordinary. John represents the type of heroism to which most people pay lip service but little real attention—unless it is politically convenient, like The Hurt Locker passing off action-genre tropes (and fashionable pessimism) as a true response to war. It’s worth appreciating that Dear John is just a different form of similar sentimentality. As in The Hurt Locker, the audience’s war fatigue is what’s exploited.

The civilian scenes where John and Savannah meet, fall in love and attempt to negotiate their future together don’t reference the current political moment except that the war seems far away—unconnected to people’s daily preoccupations. Sappy director Lasse Hallstrom only glancingly identifies John as the type of working-class Southern white boy who joins-up. John’s motivation—isolated from his disabled, uncommunicative father—(Richard Jenkins) isn’t any more serious than Jeremy Renner’s bogus pathology in The Hurt Locker. It’s a sentimental cliché (Dear John is based on one of Nicholas Sparks’ romance novels).

Both movies epitomize the superficial, essentially non-committal view of these war times that Hollywood’s less partisan filmmakers find safe (and profitable). At least with Dear John, viewers can’t fool themselves that they’re watching a definitive political statement. Dear John is only definitive when it recalls a fleeting moment in The Thin Red Line where Terence Malick (quoting WWII novelist James Jones) poeticizes the essence of wartime heartache when a soldier stuck in the South Pacific received a classic “Dear John” kiss-off letter. It was a surprisingly banal moment in Malick’s sophisticated lyricism—less moving than this film’s inspired coin metaphor.

As John Tyree, Channing Tatum is a rare coin, the opposite of patrician, his imposing height, physical agility and sensual features make him an ideal representative of American normalcy. Not that All-American Caucasian cliché, but virile underclass guys. Tatum specializes in the taciturn masculinity, popularized by hip-hop, where boys are only articulate when behind the mic. But Dear John pushes Tatum too far into this interiorized sensitivity; he needs to be as beautifully expressive as Paul Walker was in the last really good romance movie, Noel. Instead, Tatum mostly pouts, yet he’s got the most communicative shoulder blades since Toshiro Mifune’s Yojimbo.

Dear John’s best characterization is the small role of Savannah’s family friend played by Henry Thomas whose final scene strikes a heartbreaking, impassioned tone. Yes, the same prodigious young actor who was Elliott in E.T. More than any passing reference to the Iraq War, Thomas (like Dee Wallace’s first screen appearance in years as the kindly waitress in Extraordinary Measures) stirs cultural memory.