Nights in Rodanthe: why can be a film so boring?

I do believe that love stories can be at least as suspenseful and riveting as when people pointing guns at each other. However, romantic comedies and dramas are much more difficult to make and often fail utterly. So was "Nights in Rodanthe", which fell through with the critics when it was released last fall. When wed watched it last Saturday on iTunes, I felt pretty empty, even though I generally liked the actors, Diane Lane and Richard Gere and the locale, the Outer Banks in Northern Carolina, was extremely beautiful. But other than that there was absolutely no reason why this film has been made. I don't know the Nicholas Sparks novel, so I cannot say if there was a reason why this book was ever written.

So why did the story of "Nights in Rodanthe" fail so miserably?

• You need interesting characters. A woman and a man from mildly dysfunctional families is not cutting it. Living separated from husband and being in a conflict with her teenage daughter? Estranged with his son over work? Just look around, really does a movie have to be made around this? And a doctor loosing a patient, not through malpractice, but just bad luck?
• Love needs to be believable. This usually requires that the audience falls in love with both characters. The fact that actors are attractive people helps, but there needs to be something else and a movie needs time to show that. But "Nights" couldn't spend a lot time on the love story, because it needed some left for it's dramatic after-play. So we just had to believe that they found soulmates in each other.
• Something needs to happen. Exposing the characters to a stream of unrelated, random events is not a story we need to watch a movie for. That happens to us every day. A story for a movie needs more - it needs to glue the audience in front of the screen, anticipating or dreading the next scene. In "Nights" drama strikes like a lightning out of blue sky (you could almost hear writer and/or screenwriter mutter: "I don't do happy ends! Never!"), at a time when I was looking forward going to bed and dreaming of a beach house.

But again, this movie was funded and filmed, failed at the box office, but probably still is profitable in the end (we paid $3.99 to see it). But it is disheartening why there are so few filmmakers out there who can get a decent romantic drama or comedy going.

Comments

[Elke Nominikat]

You absolutely nailed it! There wasn't enough time to develop these characters. They were boring. And what upset me the most was the ending. *SPOILER ALERT* Why did Richard Gere's character had to die under such unbelievable circumstances? The was it with this movie!