No one would call Special Forces Sgt. John Tyree verbose. And the taciturn soldier is especially tongue-tied after meeting young and gentle Savannah Lynn Curtis on a South Carolina beach.
Bumbling through his crush on the girl of his dreams, John asks her out. And over the brief course of his two-week leave, the couple falls in love.
When they must part ways--Savannah going back to college and John back to combat--they vow their affection and promise to write. Savannah makes him swear to "write everything."
For a year they both do, reinforcing their romance.
And if all went as planned in the world, after those 12 months they would have been married. But life throws complications--John's is known as Sept. 11, 2001. Feeling the call of duty trumping his personal preferences, an emotionally torn John reenlists in the Army.
Rather than pride, however, Savannah feels abandoned.
They send many more letters to each other. But gradually Savannah stops writing everything. And then she stops writing altogether. But not before she sends John an actual Dear John letter, telling him she's engaged to someone else. Wounded to the core, John must decide whether to despise her or to lovingly sacrifice for the woman who has meant so much to him.
CONCLUSION
Dear John is based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks, an author whose very name seems to invoke uncontrollable sniffling. And, indeed, women were crying all over the place as Dear John's credits rolled at the screening I attended.
All I felt was aggravation.
If these ladies shed tears for the loyal, generous, jilted-and-misunderstood John, it would be
understandable. But their weeping seemed more likely to have been caused by the idea that "helpless" Savannah was an equal sufferer in the heartbreak. After all, she had to devastate John. In tears herself, she spoke of being all alone during his deployments. She didn't know what to do, she said, and she needed to feel needed! She said she "didn't have a choice" but to abandon John because there was another man who needed her. And he wouldn't leave in the name of duty.
At one point Savannah howls at John, saying her life without him has no meaning and has became a "marathon." That is, she all but says she had to cheat on him because he forced her to through his absence.
Poor heroine. And by that I mean poor, foolish, selfish, emotionally puny heroine.
But I must move on now.
Romantically, Dear John is an inadvertent cautionary tale about the dangers of making any human being the center of one's universe. Both John and Savannah are so engulfed by their love affair that little else seems to fulfill them. But as many a man and woman has discovered over the ages, no mere human can satisfy anyone's every emotional need.
Savannah does seem to grow up a bit by story's end. And maybe she even realizes that her decision to marry another man while John was serving his country was selfish and hurtful. Once she decides to marry, she sticks it out, even when her husband gets cancer. It's at this point that many girls would rapidly backtrack and go back to the younger and stronger John. She doesn't. And I can't say enough good things about John through all of this. He's selfless almost to a fault, and while I don't know how wise it is for him to leave his heart resting in Savannah's otherwise occupied hands, he certainly can't be faulted for sacrificing financially to help her husband.
Go ahead: Ponder the rightness or wrongness of Savannah's decision to write that Dear John letter. You already know how I feel about it. But be moved by John's willingness to forgive. The second chance he offers Savannah. The redemption he extends. And the picture (flawed though it may be at times) of God he creates--for we all have been unfaithful to our divine lover.
Is it possible for all of that to exist in a movie that's more Harlequin romance than serious exploration of love found and lost? Grudgingly I'll say maybe. For there were times as I wrote this that I would have rather just summed things up with: The stoic hero gets emotionally battered and the silly heroine never learns enough to deserve him--and yet, inexplicably, he takes her back.
A tissue, if you please.
SOURCE: Plugged In - Meredith Whitmore
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