Dear John

As a dying soldier lays bloodied in battle, a spray of bullets echoing overhead, coins begin to fall all around him. Leaving the frontline behind, we flash back to our stricken cadet’s childhood and a school trip to the US Coin Mint. Like the immaculate silver dollars punched from the same metal sheet, John Tyree (Channing Tatum) is a commodity. Having been melted down, reshaped and polished, he’s sent out into the world in the wake of 9/11 only to return dulled, dented and unmistakably changed.

Against the backdrop of war, Dear John could so easily slip into ranks as a socially aware retort to America’s well-furrowed recent history. But this isn’t that sort of film. Young love is director Lasse Hallström’s bag, although disappointingly (if not surprisingly) this star-crossed love song is far schmaltzier than first glance would suggest.

Playing Juliet to Channing’s jarheaded Romeo is Amanda Seyfried, who sparkles and fizzes as do-gooder girl-next-door Savannah Curtis. A headstrong sophomore with a heart as gold as her cascading, sun-kissed tresses, Savannah and John’s paths cross in a quixotic encounter that sees John nonchalantly leap from a pier to retrieve Savannah’s purse. We, like Savannah, are drawn to John – whose steely demeanour is shed in a single selfless act.

A picturebook romance blossoms, as the pair waste away the summer months locked in the blinkered arms of adolescent infatuation. The sun soon sets on their summer fling, however, as John is cattled off on duty in the Middle-East. Determined not to let their flame fade, the pair pen letters to each other, which are nauseatingly recited in pining voiceover fashion. Following the outbreak of war in Iraq, John decides to reenlist and in doing seals the couple’s doomed fate. As time goes on John’s letters are increasingly left unanswered, before Savannah plucks up the courage to send her absent lover one final, fatal Dear John.

Devastated, but having completed his tour, John returns home some months later to care for his mentally ill father Bill (Richard Jenkins), whom Savannah has built up a rapport with during John’s time away. You see, Savannah’s all about the charity cases, which is solemnly hammered home when (*SPOILER WARNING*) John learns that her new man is not a preppy rich kid – as he’d suspected – but rather her elder neighbour Tim (Henry Thomas), who’s terminally ill with a rare type of cancer. Tim’s son, like John’s father, is autistic and Savannah has taken him on as her own in preparation for Tim’s imminent death.

It’s a case of handicaps and heartache from here on in as John is left ruing the loss of his sweetheart, although ultimately he’s sympathetic to her cause, quickly coming to accept her decision. Whether by now you’re reaching for the Kleenex box or the sick bucket, it’s desperately frustrating how passively John steps aside. Admittedly you’d be hard pushed to justify having a Special Forces Sergeant lay into a dying cancer patient, but after 90 minutes of melancholic tedium, you’ll be baying for something, anything, in the way of action. But no, Hallström hasn’t quite finished spooning on the syrup just yet. After one final good deed, John returns to combat and the film comes full circle: the drippy opening monologue repeated as our lovelorn leading man sucks in one last lungful of air and becomes a hero statistic.

Adam Woodward

Anticipation:

‘From the writer of The Notebook.’

Enjoyment:

Channing steps it up and Seyfried sparkles, but Hallström has seriously over-egged this weepy melodrama.

In Retrospect:

Insultingly uninspired chick-flick fodder.