A Walk to Remember; The Son's Room

Can chick flicks and dude flicks meet? A Walk to Remember presents a nice girl and a bad boy who fall in love. Landon (Shane West) carouses with a North Carolina high school crowd whose mischief is illegal and almost fatal. Jamie (Mandy Moore), a preacher's quiet daughter, gives every scene the serenity of an old-fashioned melodrama. Landon's opening sequence recalls I Know What You Did Last Summer, then Jamie's scenes turn it into Love Story. This may only be a commercial ploy, but the nighttime/daytime contrast demonstrates the exact ways that contemporary Hollywood filmmaking has broken down into demographically designated conventions. A Walk to Remember is split between catering to the notion of a male preference for films about life getting dangerously beyond one's control and the presumably female interest in how characters accept life-or-death situations. To imply sensitivity is girly, while violence possesses a Y chromosome, denigrates the quality that elevates movies into art. A Walk to Remember might have been a terrific entertainment, except that it's cautious about bringing chick-flick and dude-flick sensibilities together artistically.

Looking deeper, A Walk to Remember's conflict is also a philosophical one. Director Adam Shankman, his screenwriter Karen Janszen, the producers and actors can't settle on the film's obvious moral center. This story resembles those subcultural, proselytizing Christian movies like The Cross and the Switchblade?a genre Paul Schrader once told Film Comment deserved its own special study. (The recent Left Behind is another example of Christian-propaganda films.) Hollywood occasionally devises its own variant of less devout, faith-based movies?from Schrader's own Light of Day to Untamed Heart to the more recent A Dog of Flanders and Bonnie Hunt's Return to Me. The difference is in how the subcult films sanction religious belief (almost as cautionary tales) and the Hollywood films treat faith glancingly. Both are distinct from movies that secularize (or bowdlerize) faith into ersatz humanism like the recent, deplorable Chocolat.

A Walk to Remember wafts blandly between romance and holiness, seemingly uncertain about its emotional tone. As we watch Landon emulate what used to be called juvenile delinquency and Jamie embody an almost obsolete virginal ideal, the filmmakers appear on the crux between seducing their target youth audience and trying to provide it some edifying substance. Skeptics can laugh this off as hokey, but that's too easy. A Walk to Remember has some genuine emotional appeal in the way its story weds teen-danger and teen-hope into a life lesson. However, this adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel is more complicated than the last Sparks adaptation, Kevin Costner's uplifting Message in a Bottle, because we're used to teen movies being ribald and unserious, sticking to chick-flick/dude-flick divisions. The abstinence and solemnity here seem so old-fashioned that even Landon and Jamie's single parents (respectively Daryl Hannah and Peter Coyote) are without the expected neuroses, and they relate calmly to their children.

Jamie seems almost otherworldly, an agent of metaphysical awareness Landon must strive toward. She introduces Landon to astronomy, a form of stargazing and heavenly aspiration reminiscent of Thomas Hardy's Two on a Tower. When jealous classmates plan Jamie's humiliation in the school cafeteria, she briefly loses her sunny self-confidence and the cruelty is provocative and elaborately staged as in De Palma's Carrie. Each plot turn brings the filmmakers up against Sparks' portentousness (its intrinsic to this love story as it also was to Message in a Bottle) yet they also try soft-peddling its religious basis. As a result, they lose conviction. This is a quasi-God-fearing fantasy; only Lord of the Rings is more odd, but the recipe mixing teen-pop appeal and inchoate spirituality makes A Walk to Remember more interesting.

What faith-based virtue the film does maintain comes from Mandy Moore. She sings several pop-gospel tunes and Shankman films her big number, "Only Hope," ethereally; through dissolves and superimpositions, he lets the act of singing reveal Jamie's seraphic essence. In the Britney Spears era of jail-bait sensationalism, Moore's performance might even be called fearless. (Reinventing the pop idea of "madonna" is no small feat.) Moore forsakes MTV pop-stardom to gamble on presenting a completely opposite teen type. Jamie wears ankle-length dresses and a crocheted sweater that the cool kids in school laugh at, evoking Dolly Parton's classic bio-tune "Coat of Many Colors"?a song with biblical references (Jamie even acknowledges Parton as "smart"). There's a kind of unhip conviction in Moore's performance, a Protestant plainness that is unusual to see in mainstream movies. This in-the-world-but-not-of-the-world individuality is crucial to Jamie's character. Her sense of life-on-earth as a way-station to preparing for transcendence is more fascinating than Shane West's bad boy.

Credit Moore that this characterization is never sticky-sweet. The fact that it is also, occasionally, sensual is not lost on Shankman, who hypes it when Jamie performs in a high school play. She's costumed in white satin and photographed as if on tv's Touched by an Angel. And yet Moore unfurls her teen-idol glamour. Wearing her brunette hair with red tints and sexy curls, she recalls Kate Bush's fetching pose on the cover of The Kick Inside?another example of pop with mystical referents. It's a Hollywood milestone that Moore can play a Christian without being derided. Jamie's wish ("To witness a miracle") is simply stated and more beguiling than even Jennifer Connelly could make the hollow line, "I need to believe that something extraordinary is possible," in A Beautiful Mind. In that ridiculous film, the wish actually only means, "I need the American people to swallow something patently false." Something in A Walk to Remember feels right: it's the briefly glimpsed idea that girls and boys (lovers or moviegoers) have emotional and narrative needs that don't have to be separated.

The Son's Room Directed by Nanni Moretti Greater than the chick-flick/dude-flick division is that between European and American cinema. It would be nice to proclaim that Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room does everything right that the very similar In the Bedroom does wrong. That's true, but still not enough. As an art film, The Son's Room looks more deeply and honestly at bereaved parents and a strained marriage than In the Bedroom. Moretti himself plays a psychiatrist whose family life is rocked by the unexpected death of his teenage son, but, as in Caro Diario, Moretti seems too impressed with himself. He's a narcissist mistaken for a soul-bearing artiste. While his pursuit of emotional revelation feels sincere (the scene of an agnostic middle-class family sitting through a pro-forma mass is strikingly original), the story in The Son's Room has little dramatic urgency. In the Bedroom offends by using class resentment to distract from its inexact dramatic sense (Todd Field bungles his own mother-monster title metaphor). But Moretti's wan tale, though not repugnant, still is not profound. It's cultivated (tastefully showing the mother's grief) where In the Bedroom (which elides the mother's grief scene) is disingenuous. European filmmakers are simply better at conceptualizing their themes, so The Son's Room ends with an extended metaphor of love, not vengeance. The difference between this and Hollywood is immense.