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Oh, Nicholas Sparks, will the world ever tire of your soft-Southern-rain, tinged-with-tragedy romantic melodramas? Michael Hoffman directs this latest adaptation, and it’s a double-header: two romances for the price of one! Former high school sweethearts (Michelle Monaghan and James Marsden) return to their hometown for a funeral. This will-they-or-won’t-they is intercut with the tale of how their relationship developed as teens: She’s a rich girl, he’s white trash, but each comes from ridiculously caricatured families, so they’ve got that in common. For fans of novelist Sparks, it’s all here: the hero with a secret, the charming cottages, a “shocking” death, canoodling in water and ridiculous contrivance … um, I mean, fateful events.
This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2014.
