A love story as pure and emotionally delicious as “A Walk to Remember” will always be special no matter the modern era’s sarcasm The plot follows the romance story of two 18-year-olds and is perfectly summarized by the boy telling the girl’s reluctant father Jamie has faith in me. She makes me want to be different. Better. In a world filled with crass, rude teenage movies, this one tells a heartfelt tale of how teenagers are more than the ignorant beings that Hollywood paints them to be.
The beautiful and talented singer Mandy Moore plays Jamie Sullivan, an outcast in school who is made fun of for always standing apart and wearing the same faded blue sweater. Her father is a local minister. We see her school life at Wendover High School and join her while she suffers through mocking laughter from her classmates. Shane West portrays Landon Carter, a senior who has it all a popular girlfriend, friends, and a carefree life until a silly prank leaves one of his friends paralyzed after a diving accident and completely changes everything for him. As part of the punishment for his prank, Landon is forced to join the drama club and Jamie is part of that club. One day we see how Landon starts to notice Jamie. He asks her to help him rehearse for a play he is acting in and to his surprise, she agrees. Jamie however is not what he expected. She is not one of those people who feel sorry for themselves, but rather someone with confidence and a cheerful disposition. She is simply smart and kind, reminding us that there are some good people in this world.
The story has twists and turns I won’t spoil for you. For now, it is more effective to analyze how Jamie’s calm demeanor transforms Landon into a kinder individual: how she encourages him to genuinely win her over. Toward the end of the movie, when he is hanging out with some of his old friends, he is approached by her who says, See you tonight. He half-jokingly responds, In your dreams. When he eventually shows up at her house, she is hurt and angry, and his pathetic excuses make him wonder why he bothered even trying.
A particular danger lies within the Peter Coyote character, the reverend whose church Landon attends. Movies always have that one stereotype of a reactionary Bible-thumping parent or guardian who is absolutely against any form of teenage romance. There is a tiny bit of that here: for instance, Jamie is not allowed to date, although there is more to his decision than mere overpowering strictness. But when Landon goes to the Rev. Sullivan and asks him to have faith in him, the minister hears him out with not-so-affected curiosity.
Indeed, the film gets cheesy at times, but the cheesiness is perfectly fine in moderation. I have said this before, and I stick to my claim that the movie brought out a lot of emotion on its behalf. This is an example of how movies may feel a bit too overdone towards the end, but sometimes, they take the viewer on a ride to enable them to lose themselves in the storyline. Adam Shankman, the director, and Karen Janszen, his writer, who works alongside him on the novel adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ books, have an instinctive faith in the material that enables them to, at times, oversimplify the most complex issues. Being “off” is something that they achieve exactly three times. First, the storyline with the critically injured child is not dealt with or simply dropped there needs to be a resolution either way. Second, it is overly obnoxious to make the black teenage boy pepper his speech with “brother” over and over again as if he is some alien instead of treating him like a peer. Third, as Kuleshov demonstrated more than eighty years ago during a well-known experiment, an audience will conjure the needed feelings and sentiments that they are watching through a motionless close-up. An actor attempting to “act” in a close-up can prove fatal, and trying to Landon’s little smile in the close-up keeps me from being as engaged as I need to be at that point.
They don’t undermine the movie as a whole. The performance by Moore and West is so convincing in a subtle way, that their scenes make us recall how most teenagers in films appear to possess the mentality of a thirty-year-old standup comedian. Jamie and Landon falling in love with each other on the basis of morals and respect comes off as shocking to some viewers of the film. This is especially the case because the first five or ten minutes feel like a typical teenage movie. A Walk To Remember is a small treasure.
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