I’ve got to be careful with A Walk to Remember. The last time I trashed a ‘wholesome’ movie, the wrath of wholesome movie lovers was unleashed. “Why do you need to jump all over one of the few decent movies that ever comes along?” they asked. “Why do you only praise movies filled with sin that set such bad examples for our young people.”
Well, I feel for these folks. Hollywood does give them a raw deal. The vast majority of films offend their sensibilities, and when one that isn’t offensive comes along, it’s all-too-often an embarrassingly awful film. Who decided that such a high proportion of the scripts for ‘family values’ cinema needed to be banal and shallow?
A quick reality check rules out grand conspiracy; after all, most Hollywood movies are forgettable. It’s just that people who pine for decency at the movies get so few to choose among. When three quarters of them are awful, it seems doubly unfair.
I wish I could say that A Walk to Remember is a movie that’s both wholesome-themed and well made. But it isn’t. It’s a shallow, simplistic, sentimental pack of clichés that manages to cover every overly familiar theme associated with James Dean and Love Story.
This movie makes Sweet November seem positively rich and meaningful. It starts with 30-seconds of The Fast and the Furious, as a bunch of faux tough guys and girls gather to haze a would-be member of the ‘cool’ group at their small-town North Carolina high school. Landon Carter (Shane West) is the coolest of the cool, but when the evening’s events go awry, he finds himself sentenced to clean up the school grounds, tutor disadvantaged kids, and perform in the school play. This brings the rebellious Landon into contact with school nebbish Jamie Sullivan (Mandy Moore), the reverend’s daughter – a girl who wears baggy clothes, makes no effort to be ‘cool’ and carries a bible everywhere she goes.
From there, things go exactly where you’d predict, and when the Beauty and the Beast themes start to run short, we get an injection of ‘disease of the week’ to carry things through to the movie’s end. It’s utterly predictable, but still shocking as it unfolds – shocking because it’s difficult to imagine that this kind of elementary school-level facile sentimentality could actually make it to the screen. The bad guys are whitewashed bad guys – Landon’s tough gang buddies all go docilely to church every week, and of course they’re all decent at heart. The film’s conflict is equally insubstantial. There is nothing challenging about this movie, except trying to stay in your seat ‘till it’s done.
The characters are one-dimensional – poor Daryl Hannah and Peter Coyote do their best with what they get as supporting players, but it’s even less than what the not-so-talented West and Moore have to work with. Moore is harmless, bringing zero depth to Jamie, while West’s sneering pretty boy act has worn out its welcome in just a couple of years of big screen work.
This isn’t to say that nothing interesting happens in the film. We do get to see a classic Hollywood example of a dread disease without any symptoms – until, of course, it’s time for the sentiment to turn tragic. And we also get to see West set a new world record by completing all seven stages of grieving in a single night.
This is an awful movie that will only satisfy the most emotionally malleable of filmgoers. And it’s not the wholesome theme that’s the problem. It’s the rotten storyline, pedestrian direction and weak acting.
