Dear John
Dear John’s signature style of over-simplifying and repeating everything leaves no room for subtlety or duality of meaning but sometimes that’s exactly what is called for.

Dear John left me haunted by images of director Lasse Hallström blowing his nose, lighting cigars and wiping his bum with mucky fistfuls of dollars. This is the film that knocked Avatar off its perch and down to second  in the US weekly charts back in February.  Taking $30 million on (no accident) Superbowl weekend, the denizens of conservative middle-America were gimpy deer in the laser sighted aim of Dear John’s bazooka. It is barely fit for analysis but because, in quite a serious way, its commercial success is like a weird punchline to the Bush era… here goes:

Hallström has made countless movies to some critical acclaim. Among them are What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Cider House Rules, and Chocolat. Right now though, there is a nice symmetry to his career that suggests a path towards artistic exile: his name was made with My Life as a Dog in 1985 and this year he released Hachi: A Dog’s Tale. The first is a universally acclaimed story of a 12 year old Swedish boy coming to terms with his mother’s mortality; the second stars Richard Gere opposite a dog.

John Tyree played by Channing Tatum is a US soldier on leave for two weeks back home in North Carolina meets Amanda Seyfried’s Savannah Curtis, a college student on spring break back home in North Carolina. They fall in love. After a wholesome, whirlwind romance John returns to duty, Savannah to college and they promise to write to each other and reunite at the end of his tour. When John has almost completed his service, something happens to throw their romance off course. Outside of the romantic leads we have Richard Jenkins as John’s dad (possibly autistic), a boy called Alan (definitely autistic) and his single father Tim (Henry Thomas). They all eventually become bound into the central plot but every tragedy is in service of the leaden lover’s tale.

Even on its own terms, the film fails because the central relationship doesn’t work. John is a very dim man whereas Savannah is lively and engaged. The credibility gap needs to be bridged by a chemistry that never materialises. Any magic on set needed more than HD cameras to pick it up. John and Savannah look at one another like they’re the embodiment of intrigue and profundity. They are not that, in spite of Tatum and Seyfried’s best efforts.

Henry Thomas gives a decent performance as an unlikely love rival but in a mediocre cast Richard Jenkins stands out in a way that almost redeems his involvement. Mr Tyree, an OCD coin collector, is a child’s blindfolded sketch barely suggesting a second dimension. Jenkins transcends space-time to conjure an affecting and human portrayal that, in fleeting moments, had me involved in the story. As impressed as I was by his performance, it was sad to see that on this evidence he has no qualms about using his powers for evil.

The writing in Dear John is some of the worst I’ve ever seen, with two distinct varieties of appalling exposition. The first, a common indiscretion: the lazy writer’s filler to avoid more skilful storytelling. The second, glaring in its frequency here and rarer as a species: the patronising aside to an audience assumed too dim to have kept pace. Here’s Savannah with her boyfriend, don’t they seem a bad fit? Now here’s Savannah doing some talking: “Me and my boyfriend, we’re not a great fit.” Now, there’s John, engaging Alan (autistic, remember) in a really sympathetic way. What’s that Savannah? “That’s amazing. Alan only usually speaks to family.” Really Savannah? Just his family? “And me. Because I’m the female lead and it’s really important that I’m incredibly sympathetic too.” (That last bit might not be verbatim.)

Dear John filled me with that terrible revulsion you might feel on discovering a grim deposit in a public toilet. It’s almost impossible to face the idea: someone did that. To say that it is a crime against humanity would only show a lack of taste and perspective in tune with the film itself. Perspective is one of many p-words the film calls to mind, (populist, pungent, ponderous and prejudiced among them) but two, more than the others, characterise why the movie won’t fare so well over here. It is patronising. And it is propaganda. The US army need not commission an enlistment video. Thank you Lasse Hallestrom.

It pretends to deal seriously with things like absence, war, parenthood, illness and loss but at times it feels like a contrived and insidious portrait of the folks back home only to better justify killing all those A-rabs and I-raqis.

I only have the energy to deal with two of its most tasteless elements. Firstly, to show that it’s not just its politics that are poisonous, it exploits autism as shorthand for socially vulnerable and slightly odd. The film has two characters with the disorder both exploited as functions for sympathetic behaviour in others. It also conflates autism with OCD. The nail in the coffin though is Savannah’s edict, “I think autistic people have a sixth sense for danger, like horses.” She is the most intelligent character in the film. And the horses/autism association becomes a strand of the narrative. No. No. No. No. No.

Second is the political aspect. Now, I don’t find it too difficult to watch films that I don’t enjoy and try to sieve out their merits. For a while, I was considering how easy it is to understand middle America‘s love affair with its own domestic aspirations. I noticed that Hallestrom’s measured direction and the postcard-like photography were perfect vehicles for a simple and undemanding story. I couldn’t be so generous for long.

The film uses 9/11 as a pretext for a puerile romantic bind: love or country? This was done in a way that made me say the f-word at the screen. It hooks into the emotive, jingoistic, reactionary nonsense of the fallout while pretending to be only blandly patriotic. This is supposed to be the twist in the romantic tale.

I was still a bit stunned during the scenes that followed but I can faintly recall being unsurprised by the values and judgements assumed and reinforced. I couldn’t suspend my disbelief when the fictive strands returned. I do not use the word lightly: propaganda.

At one point there was a line of dialogue that, while spiralling into a vacuum of inanity, made me think something. Savannah says, “the saddest people I’ve ever met in life are the ones who don’t care deeply about anything at all.” Which made me think, “the scariest people I’ve ever met in life are the ones who don’t think deeply about anything at all.” They might just see this film and lap it up.

Dear John’s signature style of over-simplifying and repeating everything leaves no room for subtlety or duality of meaning but sometimes that’s exactly what is called for. I could have saved a lot of time and effort. This review might simply have read: Patronising and dangerous drivel. Utter, utter rubbish.