‘Nights in Rodanthe’: Gere, Lane look great in insubstantial romance
Published 6:08 pm Thursday, September 25, 2008
Everything’s impeccable in “Nights in Rodanthe”: the clothes, the people, the tragedy. In this movie, even the hurricane is discreet.
Based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks, the man who wrote the multi-handkerchief opus “The Notebook,” “Nights” takes us to the coast of North Carolina — you might even think the place resembles Madison County and its bridges.
Divorced mom Adrienne (Diane Lane) is tending a friend’s B&B for a long weekend; while there, she experiences a close encounter with the place’s only guest, a brooding doctor, Paul (Richard Gere).
Am I giving too much away? You thought maybe Richard Gere would show up as the only guest at an isolated B&B on the beach and Diane Lane would shrug in indifference? Did I mention a hurricane is approaching?
Along with surviving the storm, both people have a lot of issues to work out. But it helps getting your head together when you’re dressed in casual chic, have superb wine to drink and a great collection of R&B LPs by the turntable … and you look like Richard Gere and Diane Lane.
Of course, this is all everyday reality for me. In fact, excuse me while I pour another glass of Chateauneuf du Pape. But what about everybody else?
Everybody else, no doubt, will eat this movie up. It’s the kind of wish-fulfillment that hits all the bases. The only thing the filmmakers forgot was the big floppy dog — Diane Lane usually has a big floppy dog in movies like this.
The B&B in question looks like a Hollywood set, a towering wooden structure built right on the sands of Hatteras Island. You can’t believe the first big wave wouldn’t knock it over, but the place actually exists, if somewhat precariously.
Gere and Lane know how to be together, as they’ve done this before (most recently in “Unfaithful”). The romance is pretty insubstantial, but it’s easy to understand the appeal. Less easy to take is the tragic element of the story, which becomes inevitable when it begins to look as though things might turn out well.
Good to see mature people experiencing passion on screen, although if director George C. Wolfe knew more about photographing people, he might have helped Gere and Lane out a little more with issues of lighting and make-up.
Wolfe is a famed theater director — he did “Angels in America” — which just goes to prove that stage talent does not always translate to cinema. That could explain the absence of the dog; an old movie hand wouldn’t miss a trick like that.
