So…What’s Memorable About This Walk?
Romance, tears, and not a well developed character in sight - what else do you expect from the director of the so called box office hit The Wedding Planner? Adam Shankman conjures up another film that targets such a narrow audience that it completely misses the sweet spot with the majority of movie-goers. A Walk To Remember may have been ignored by most film viewers, but the posters featuring Mandy Moore and Shane West lured enough preteens and early teenagers to actually make a profit. Although, put a good looking male who falls in love with a “Plain Jane” on the screen, and the girl masses will follow.
This film gave the audience two narrative arcs for the price of one. It first began as a typical teenage movie where opposites attract, but then progresses into a mawkish tear jerker. Putting two narratives into a 100 minute feature length film forced Shankman to cut a few corners. By doing so, the characters were poorly developed, subplots were wrapped in unconvincing ways, and the entire film seems rushed. Even after all this, the tender faces around me still gasped on cue and shed tears when the characters did.
Landon Carter (Shane West) and a bunch of his beer-drinking, blaspheming friends begin the film with an initiation rite gone terribly wrong when another young man jumps from an industrial scaffolding into a shallow river. Landon is captured during his flee and is sentenced by his principle to custodial work, tutoring and participating in the spring play. The story progresses along a very predictable storyline where Landon falls in love with Jamie Sullivan (Mandy Moore). She is on the latter of the social spectrum, spending Saturday mornings tutoring children, an active participant of the astronomy club and choosing to partake in the school play. In this film, she is made fun of not for her weirdness, but for her simple, earnest goodness. She is, of course, the preacher’s daughter. Landon first develops a secret friendship with Jamie when he asks for help memorizing his lines for the play. Although, when Jamie spoke to him in front of his friends about when to meet, he turns her down with a smutty remark. Jamie understands her situation, and continues on with her unaffected self esteem and leaves. The next scene shows Landon groveling for Mandy’s help, which adds a sense of comic relief. Their friendship grows into something more and the two characters admit their love for one another. Jamie then reveals her life-altering secret. The movie takes an unbelievable leap downhill from this point.