A Miley to Remember

The Last Song

Directed by Julie Anne Robinson

Runtime: 101 min.

CONTRASTING HOLLYWOOD’S SHAMELESS commitment to 3-D gimmicks and various fratboy-slob comedies, the series of films adapted from Nicholas Sparks’ romance novels consistently offer substantive emotional expression, as in last month’s Dear John and now The Last Song. The emotions came through stronger when the Sparks franchise started over a decade ago with Message in a Bottle (1999) and A Walk to Remember (2002). But since the surprise boxoffice hit The Notebook (2004), signs of formula have become apparent: Diane Lane and Richard Gere strained to make the 2008 Nights in Rodanthe seem sincere, which contrasts the instantaneous, irresistible affect that Miley Cyrus brings to The Last Song.

Cyrus’ pop-star presence draws one into the story of rebellious Veronica surmounting her adolescent resentment when she visits her divorced father in Georgia and falls in love with local nice guy Will (Liam Hemsworth). Cyrus’ acting ability makes Veronica’s emotional make-over work. Since The Last Song is not a musical, pop-singer Cyrus does little more than a brief sing-a-long to a radio broadcast of Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved,” which serves Sparks’ basic, puppy-love sentiments. Plus, Cyrus’ round face and wide eyes recall Joan Blondell’s likable spunkiness. Amorous Veronica drops her ice-cube act to her father (Greg Kinnear) and thaws out in a manner that naturally heals their generational, Electra rift.

This emotional blossoming, absent from 3-D adventures and boy-farces, is what makes the Sparks movies notable. (The Sparks franchise is a healthier series than those John Grisham-derived flicks—except for Altman’s The Gingerbread Man and the last scene of The Firm.) Sparks’ ingenious trope is to show his characters’ advancement toward fullness of feeling and wise, rueful personal connection.When Veronica returns to the piano lessons her father taught her (and a Julliard scholarship), The Last Song doesn’t promote careerism but dramatizes her emotional breakthrough. It’s not the cornball sentimentality of The Bridges of Madison County; it’s spirituality that sustains them.

In the best Sparks film, A Walk to Remember, the spirituality was unabashedly Christian; The Last Song is diffident about this—Veronica’s father makes a stained-glass window for his boyhood church but the angel imagery is non-denominational. Christianity would not have insulted Cyrus’ core audience any more than Mandy Moore’s forthright Christian celibacy in A Walk to Remember.By miscalculating the extent of Sparks’ appeal, these filmmakers undercut their potential pop artistry.TV-director Julie Anne Robinson’s theatrical film debut features strikingly vivid widescreen vistas of the Southern setting. It’s as if she and cinematographer John Lindley were simulating the radiance of stained glass to depict a spiritually enhanced environment. Robinson also supplies Veronica with an angelic love object in Will, the tall, blond Hemsworth, whose dark eyebrows and ripe lips frame his stained-glass eyes.

All this should work together to make the climax, set at Tybee Island First Baptist Church, an epiphany similar to the spectral marvels of Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale or the profound menarche symbolism of Robert Mulligan’s Man in the Moon. Instead, The Last Song’s climax lacks even Southern white gospel conviction and winds up rather limp. It falls back on simplistic romantic conventions.There’s a subplot concerning Southern church-burnings (and a curious inclusion of a black pastor before an all-white congregation) that suggests a richer context for Sparks’ tale of forgiveness. It also suggests that as the Sparks franchise continues, it could reach beyond the chick-flick genre and embrace a cult as large as Tyler Perry’s.