NIGHTS IN RODANTHE - Blu-ray review

Can one weekend change a life? Can Blu-ray high definition save a movie? Yes and no. Yes to the first question, no to the second.

Diane Lane and Richard Gere worked so well together in 2002's "Unfaithful" that Warner Bros. decided to pair them up in 2008's "Nights in Rodanthe." The actors once again work well together, but they should have quit when they were ahead. This time out they haven't got the script to go with their talents.

Director George C. Wolfe made his big-screen directorial debut with "Nights in Rodanthe" after success as a Broadway producer-director and doing several television productions. Screenwriters Ann Peacock and John Romano based their screenplay for the movie on a novel by best-selling author Nicholas Sparks, who previously provided Hollywood with "Message in a Bottle," "A Walk to Remember," and "The Notebook." One has to wonder if anyone besides Sparks is still writing romance novels or if Hollywood is looking to any other author for romantic material.

Lane plays a divorced woman, Adrienne Willis, with a teenaged daughter and a ten-year-old son. Her ex-husband, Jack (Christopher Meloni), wants to get back together with her, but Adrienne cannot forgive his infidelity. She has devoted her life to her husband and children and now feels betrayed by his unfaithfulness. To compound matters, her daughter hates her for not allowing the father to return to the fold, and the son finds himself bewildered by it all.

Gere plays Dr. Paul Flanner, a divorced surgeon who has even more problems than Adrienne. He always put his career ahead of his family, one of his female patients accidentally died in a surgery he was performing on her, he's being sued by the woman's husband (Scott Glenn), his wife has left him, and his grown son (James Franco), also a doctor, hates him. Whew!

Coincidentally, both Adrienne and Paul wind up in the same isolated inn together in Rodanthe, a small town on the North Carolina coast. She is taking care of the inn for a friend (Viola Davis), and at the moment Paul is the only guest.

Misery loves comfort, I suppose, because Adrienne and Paul quickly find they have a lot in common in terms of personal issues and just as quickly fall into one another's arms.

Frankly, that's about it, except for the ending, which I'll get to in a moment. The story moves along like a two-person filmed stage play. Lane and Gere are in practically every scene together after the initial exposition, and there is only so much a viewer can stand of their empty talk. This is Nicholas Sparks, after all, not Eugene O'Neill, and it's "Nights in Rodanthe," not "Long Day's Journey into Night." So we can see what's coming at least two hankies ahead of time.

Yes, it's good to see a straight romantic movie that involves mature people for a change instead of endless, witless romantic comedies about twenty-year-olds. But a good romance has to have substance, too, or there's not a lot of reason for it beyond fulfilling some basic need for potboilers. Here, we get a man who loves Dinah Washington songs, a woman with an old phonograph and even older LPs, and a fairy-tale inn that looks like something out of "Lemony Snicket." It's that kind of movie.

To punctuate the couple's dilemmas, the author throws in a hurricane, which seems severe enough to have blown the whole house down but doesn't. From there, the story gets increasingly passionate, melodramatic, and, finally, maudlin.

The "finally" is the ending, which makes you go "Ah, come on!" It is as unlikely an event as you'll ever come across, and the author clearly intended it only as a manipulative plot device. If the rest of the film simply bores you, the ending will infuriate you. Come on, Sparks; you're better than that.

Up until its conclusion, "Nights in Rodanthe" is a reasonably romantic story that just happens to make for a mediocre film. It resembles more and more a soap opera as it goes along, and then it does something unforgivable at the close.

Loved "The Notebook"; could have done without "Nights."

Video:
The movie is fairly short at only ninety-seven minutes, so Warners went with a single-layer BD25 to accommodate it. Then they used a VC-1 encode to transfer the 2.40:1-ratio widescreen picture to disc at 1080p. As there is nothing about the image or the colors that jumps off the screen, it's sometimes hard to tell if the movie is in high definition or not without a direct comparison to the standard-def version. If you do make the comparison, you'll find the Blu-ray sharper and the hues marginally deeper, but it's close because the filmmakers chose to keep the image somewhat soft and pale most of the time. A few bright outdoor shots show us how good the high-def picture can be, though, and that's still pretty good.

Audio:
For whatever reason, WB reverted to their old ways of going on the cheap with the audio, giving us only a lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack on this Blu-ray disc. Granted, the soundtrack is about 99% talk, which doesn't really cry out for lossless audio, but, still, I've always thought "high-definition" referred to high-def picture AND sound. Oh, well. There is a storm about halfway through the movie where rain, wind, and thunder roar all around us, the deep bass rumbles authoritatively, and a few dynamic jolts practically knock the walls of one's listening room down. It's plenty good in Dolby Digital, but it leaves one wondering how much better it might have sounded in something like Dolby TrueHD.

Extras:
The extras are exclusive to the Blu-ray disc, and mostly they comprise a series of brief featurettes, all of them in high def. The first and longest is "The Nature of Love," twenty-one minutes on the author, the filmmakers, and the stars. Next is "An Intimate Look at In Rodanthe with Singer/Songwriter Emmylou Harris," twelve minutes with Ms. Harris, who explains this was the first time she had written a song directly for a movie. After that, we get five alternative scenes with a director commentary, totaling about seven minutes; followed by "A Time for Love: Keeping Up With Nicholas Sparks," eleven minutes with the author of fourteen best-selling novels; and a music video, "Love Remains the Same," with Gavin Rossdale.

Things conclude with some further exclusive features via BD-Live; twenty-five scene selections but no bookmarks; a slipcover for the Blu-ray case; a bonus digital copy disc of the film, compatible with iTunes and Windows Media; English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese spoken languages; French, Spanish, and Portuguese subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired.

Parting Shots:
We've all come to expect a considerable amount of sentimentality in a love story; it comes with the territory. It's just that "Nights in Rodanthe" lays it on so thick, you'd think the author had written it for folks who had never read or seen another romance before. If you like the actors, you'll probably like the movie for Lane and Gere alone. It's a shame they didn't have more to work with. "Nights is a movie that not even Blu-ray could help.