Yearning for a good cry? Look no further

Nicholas Sparks writes movies masquerading as novels. Of his 15 published books, “Dear John� is the fifth to become a film; another will be released in March and two more are ready for the cameras.

  Some of the movies have been good: “The Notebook,â€� and some, execrable, “Message in a Bottle.â€�  

   “Dear Johnâ€� is neither.

   The film is like the comforting boiled custard my Texas grandmothers made: warm, reliable, sweet, bland, therapeutic. It’s made of  the usual Sparks ingredients:  love, disease, brush with death, honor, spirituality.  And, like all Sparks novels, it rates high on the tear meter.  You’ll cry with joy and cry with sadness, with surprise and disappointment.  But you will cry.  (Yes, I did.)

   As the name trumpets, “Dear Johnâ€� is about letters: Real, old fashioned, ink-on-paper letters between girl and boy separated by distance and, here (ah, the good fortune of the contemporary novelist), by war.  

   John Tyree (Channing Tatum, who is the definition of hunk) is a soldier on leave at home in South Carolina.

   By chance (there are lots of by chances in Sparks) he meets Savannah Curtis (the velvet-eyed Amanda Seyfreid).  

   Comparing him to her college friends, she sees maturity, seriousness and sensitivity.  

   He sees love.  

   They agree to write each other until he returns soon to her arms.  Old fashioned indeed in a world of e-mail and cell phones.

   Not to be.  

   Comes 9/11.  John, the ideal Sparks hero, puts duty over romance.  He reenlists; she says, again, she’ll wait.  

   Well, cosi fan tutte.

   Women are so fickle.

   Her letters come less frequently until the fatal, final “Dear John.â€�  Devastated, John soldiers on, then returns home to find Savannah married to her college buddy, Tim, ill with a potentially terminal illness. They are too poor to pay for his treatment.  (Surely an argument for universal health care when such beautiful people are involved.)

   John to the rescue in a totally unbelievable finale that produced gully washers of tears all around me.

   All of this is directed by B-lister Lasse Hallström (“My Life as a Dogâ€�) with rather listless detachment.  

   As is, he took his paycheck, sat in the director’s chair and just watched it all happen.

   But the South Carolina coast (if that’s where the film was made) looks languid, salty, lovely and warm.

  Tatum shows hints that he may become an actor yet;  Seyfreid is good; and Richard Jenkins (“The Visitorâ€�) plays John’s nearly mute, compulsive, difficult and diffident father superbly.

   Call me sexist, and some will, I know, but “Dear Johnâ€� is really a woman’s picture and probably younger women at that.  (Opening weekend audiences were 84-percent female; 64 percent of them under 21.)

   Nothing wrong with this. I couldn’t drag my female friends to see Viggo Mortensen chop off a guy’s fingers in “Eastern Promisesâ€� (hey, the guy was dead and frozen to boot).  

   And women wanting a good cry and a night out in frozen February could do much worse than “Dear John.â€�

     “Dear Johnâ€� is playing at the Triplex in Great Barrington and elsewhere.

   It is rated PG-13 for some sensuality and violence.

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