Dear Young Women of America:  If you were into The Notebook, you’ll probably want to see Dear John.  And the film’s creators will do everything they can to manipulate you into liking it.

Novelist Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe, Message in a Bottle) is a brand name now, and his fans know what they’ll get from his stories and the movies they inspire.  In writing about last year’s Nights in Rodanthe, this critic wrote:  “It’s a world where people still write letters to each other by hand, and hear the voices of the writer as they read them.”  Rodanthe, starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane, skewed older than The Notebook though, so the SparksWorld of Dear John – as directed by Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules) -- aims to get back that young romantic crowd with beach parties, making out in the rain and forbidden love.

The star-crossed lovers are John (Channing Tatum) and Savannah (Amanda Seyfried).  John is on leave from the U.S. Army Special Forces visiting his father in South Carolina.  He’s a big heroic lunk – a good boy now but there are hints that he used to be a bad boy.  He also spends a lot of time shirtless.

Savannah is an unbelievably good girl.  She’s a wide-eyed blonde all the boys like.  She thinks she has a bad girl streak because she swears – in her head!  Her ambition:  to someday open a ranch where autistic kids can play with horses (Wow, that’s unbelievably word-in-Savannah’s-head-ing wholesome)! 

The actors do a decent job.  Tatum and Seyfried play the roles exactly as they’re supposed to.  The reliable character actor Richard Jenkins does a great job as John’s meek and perhaps autistic father, and Henry Thomas is convincing as the father of an autistic child who Savannah bonds with (yes, that’s Henry Thomas of E.T. – now playing the father of someone the age he was in E.T.).
John and Savannah spend a whirlwind two weeks together before Savannah has to go to school and John has to return to the military.  So they write letters to keep their love alive.

You think anything can go wrong?  Well, it’s set in the spring of 2001, so you know John’s military service will be more intense before long.  To give credit to the screenplay, we’re told right upfront about something bad happening to John so that we don’t have to sit there and know it’s coming. But pretty much everything else we see coming in the most cornball presentation possible.

John and his comrades-in-arms are so chummy, it just doesn’t ring true.  They needle each other, but the pressures of war never seem to get to them.  That’s probably because with the exception of a firefight, we don’t see that pressure.  In fact, there are no villains in this movie.  They’re all good salt-of-the earth people, except maybe the spoiled rich kid who’s sweet on Savannah. 
We also never see any glimpses of John’s past life.  Why?  Because Dear John assumes women like their bad boys-turned good to be mysterious.  It’s sexy to know he’s dangerous and in danger, but they don’t want to see the ugliness.

Sparks’ story and Hallstrom’s film wants to be a throwback to old fashioned wartime romances, but in trying to make it contemporary; they try and fit some square pegs into round holes.  They want 9/11 to play a role – so they have to schedule John and Savannah’s time together and time apart just right.  That means their initial two week romance takes place in the spring, forcing Savannah to go back to school in the summer.  Yes, people start college in the summer, but their courtship is shot entirely like a summer romance with its swimming and its surfing and its beach parties.  Then, amazingly, a week after 9/11, airport security allows Savannah to jump over a security barrier and hug her lover.  Their love is so strong, it defies the post-9/11 world.

But worse, they try and pull off a plot twist as it would appear in a World War II-era romance.  Admittedly, it’s a surprise.  But Hallstrom and Sparks are more into blind-siding the audience than they are the character -- because they’d realize that in the age of the internet – a person wouldn’t be surprised like that. 

But this is SparksWorld, not the real world.

Dear John (2010)
Genre: Romance
Release Date: 02/05/2010  (Showtimes & Tickets)
Studio: Sony Pictures