News: Dear John: GotchaMovies Review
posted on Monday, February 8, 2010 - 12:00:00 AM
Lasse Hallström’s Dear John is not a romance, at least not in the same vein as that other famous Nicholas Sparks’ adaptation, The Notebook (2004). A “Dear John letter” is a letter to a husband or boyfriend to inform him that your relationship with him is over; it is commonly believed that this term was coined by American women during World War II who decided to pursue a new relationship rather than wait for their man to come home from overseas. If you understand the definition of a “Dear John letter,” you already know that the end of this movie will not necessarily be a happy one.
I wanted something more from Dear John that this film was not prepared to give me, not through its screenplay or its cinematography or from its up-and-coming actors, very similarly placed in their careers as Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams were in 2004 but not of the same caliber. Dear John sounds like a love story: Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried) meets bad-boy-turned-soldier John Tyree (Channing Tatum) during a spring break home from college. Within the two weeks they spend together, they fall in love. They vow to stay together, writing letters back and forth to one another despite being apart for at least a year’s time. When John’s tour of duty is extended in the aftermath of 9/11, Savannah begins to question the longevity of their relationship. A series of plot twists extends from this point to blur and obscure the reality of their situation, ultimately ending in the newest American film cop-out: the “non-ending.”
The lack of detail provided in Dear John serves to bar the adult viewer from feeling that the story has real credibility. While I imagine in the current political climate, problems similar to those that Savannah and John face when civilian and soldier try to build a life together are rather common, Savannah and John’s story is not relatable. Their initial attraction is too rushed to allow the mature viewer to attach much feeling to these characters; the movie is geared more toward the female teenage movie viewer who finds pleasure in Twilight’s unreal attraction.
While I haven’t read Sparks’ Dear John yet, it seems the film unnecessarily complicates some aspects of the book, for example, the relationship between Tim Wheddon and Savannah. In the book, Tim is an older brother figure, close in age to Savannah, whose autistic brother Alan captures her heart; however, in the film, Tim (Henry Thomas – you may recognize him as Elliott in E.T.) is a father figure for Savannah and Alan (Braeden Reed at age 6, Luke Benward at 14) is his son. The young character of Randy (Scott Porter) seems to have been needlessly conjured up as a youthful rival for John.
Despite its purported love story, the most compelling relationship in Dear John exists between John and his autistic father, played by Richard Jenkins. John was raised by his father, whose compulsive personality type (he collected coins obsessively, and days were counted by what kind of food was on the table) became a point of contention between Mr. Tyree and his rebellious teenage son. Savannah sees into this father-son dynamic, recognizing the love Mr. Tyree has for his son that John had stopped being able to see. While Mr. Tyree may suffer from Asperger’s syndrome in Sparks’ Dear John, in the film, Savannah describes his affliction as a “mild form of Autism.” As the film progresses and John is pulled farther from home, I found myself more attuned to the strength of John and Mr. Tyree’s relationship than the romance developing between John and Savannah.
Despite this lackluster review, Dear John successfully beat Avatar out of the number one box office position in its opening weekend, with a 84 percent female audience. Hopefully one of these days, a film better than Dear John will prove that women are a valid box office demographic worthy of the same level of marketing strategies devoted to a male-driven summer blockbuster.
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