In Nights in Rodanthe, Diane Lane plays an unhappy ex-married who meets her soul mate (Richard Gere) while looking after her best friend’s beachfront hotel in North Carolina. After making crinkly eyes at one another for a few scenes — long enough to establish the complementary nature of their respective mid-life crises (she’s debating re-connecting with her cheating ex; he had a woman die on his high-end cosmetic-surgery operating table) — the pair retire to the hotel’s attic, where Lane shows Gere the wooden box she made as a child using her beloved father’s tools, the purpose of which is to house “the things that she loves."

 

Given that Nights in Rodanthe is a Nicholas Sparks adaptation, there are no points for predicting that this line will take on a melancholy connotation by the end. If you’re the type to buy into Sparks’ brand of soft-pedal emotional terrorism — in which attractive, well-to-do people conquer their ennui only to be rudely thwarted by fate — it will be unbearably moving. And if you’re not, you’ll at least marvel at how Gere and Lane (especially Lane) manage to invest this patently ridiculous material (is that really a hurricane being employed as an aphrodisiac three years after Katrina?) with some semblance of dignity — at least until that gaggle of wild horses shows up.

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