The Best Of Me
Michael Hoffman
The story: After surviving an oil rig accident, Dawson (James Marsden) believes there is a reason why he was spared. Later, he is reunited with his high-school sweetheart Amanda (Michelle Monaghan), now a wife and mother, at the will-reading of a mutual friend. Through flashbacks, we learn about Dawson and Amanda’s love story and why they have not met in 21 years. An adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ 2011 novel of the same name.

The Best Of Me could be a best-of collection of previous Nicholas Sparks weepies. As you read the general plot of the new movie adaptation, past Sparks stories will come to mind.
For instance: Dawson says at one point that he and Amanda are the lucky ones for getting a second chance at love, reminding one that Zac Efron had just starred in The Lucky One (2012), yet another Sparks adaptation.
Worse news for the writer than the fact that he appears to be repeating himself is that The Best Of Me limped to a US$10-million (S$12.9-million) opening in the United States.
That is less than half what the last Sparks adaptation, Safe Haven (2013), earned in its first weekend (US$21 million).
In the new work, Australian up-and-comer Luke Bracey (November Man, 2014), playing the younger Dawson, is a brainiac who does not know how to flirt.
He is also the boy from the wrong side of the tracks and so Amanda’s father tries to pay him off to keep him away. America in the 1990s has more in common with the Hong Kong of 1950s melodramas than one might suspect.
It is also very thoughtful of the villains, namely Dawson’s dad and assorted other deadbeat relatives, that they show up at the most opportune moments and inflict just enough villainy to move things along.
Fast forward two decades and the movie poses the conundrum: What happens to a romance when one party is now a wife and mother?
And what is the woman to do when faced with a doe-eyed and dishy James Marsden (Hairspray, 2007)?
For all the justifications of a sweet romantic history and a cooling marriage, there is no denying the fact that the movie treads on adultery territory.
As if knowing he is in a morally unsavoury situation, director Michael Hoffman (who also helmed the lacklustre Gambit, 2012) then extricates himself from it in the most preposterous way possible.
Alas, there are at least two more Sparks adaptations in the works.
(ST)