'The Best of Me': Nicholas Sparks rides again
James Marsden and Michelle Monaghan are high school lovers reunited by fate actually, by Nicholas Sparks in the soapy The Best of Me.
NICHOLAS Sparks, known for his weepy, florid stories of romance, is also preoccupied with class.
His heroes are invariably young men from the wrong side of the tracks, muscular strivers who attract the attention of well-to-do young women.
The most recent version in Sparks' "The Best of Me" is Dawson, a smart kid from a family of moonshiners, a clan run by an abusive redneck who looks like he's on leave from one of those old Joe Don Baker "Walking Tall" movies.
Dawson (Luke Bracey, a name Sparks might have come up with) runs from the abuse and finds refuge with a kindly old mechanic (Gerald McRaney), who gives the young runaway shelter and a trade to learn.
Free to work and study, Dawson shines in school, and catches the eye of a local rich girl Amanda (Liana Liberato), as flirtatious as Dawson is shy, soon they're deeply in love, and he thinks it was his idea.
Flash forward 20 years or so. He's grown up to be James Marsden, she's Michelle Monaghan, and we see they've gone in different directions. He's a bachelor roughneck, she's married with a son about to enter college.
A funeral brings them back together, where we see they're still very much in love - the narrative follows this will-they-or-won't they track (of course they will), while a parallel story fills in the details of their long-ago estrangement.
Suffice it to say that young Dawson has trouble reaching escape velocity when it comes to his family - a collection of caricatures one can only call a cracker-palooza.
Elsewhere there are the Sparks touches - romantic songs that unite lovers and call across oceans and time to matched souls, blah blah blah.
But that's not the most noteworthy thing about "The Best of Me." What's unforgettable is the way director Michael Hoffman, in a key scene, matches Monaghan's red sundress and a field of poppies to the precise color of the Budweiser label, a prop featured in so many scenes.
Given the company's obvious sponsorship of the movie, no wonder it's so hard on, um, regional distillers.