True Nicholas Sparks fans will find the author’s latest book-to-screen hit, The Best Of Me, a satisfying and, yes, heartrending, theatrical experience.

The tale follows two star-crossed lovers who reunite twenty-one years after separating—not twenty, as an initially frazzled Amanda, played by Michelle Monaghan, erroneously suggests. Her love interest, played by the brooding and yet utterly charming James Marsden, is the Sparks trope Dawson, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks who is enraptured by Amanda’s spirited Southern Belle. The film opens on a heroic Marsden saving countless co-workers upon his oil rig as it collapses in flames, before suffering a fall that forces him to medical leave. Soon after being discharged from the hospital, he receives word that his dear friend Tuck has passed away, played in flashbacks by the gruff but endearing Gerald McRaney; unbeknownst to Dawson, Amanda has received the same news, and the two are reunited in their mourning. After a somewhat comical reading of Tuck’s will, the pair find that they possess dual ownership of Tuck’s idyllic cottage, and so the duo ventures into what rapidly becomes a wistful revamp of their high school romance.

 

As is always the case with troubled love stories, the plot does not run smoothly, and the amorous pair find that a neat and tidy happy ending may not be as simple as it seems. However, amidst sweeping panoramic glamour shots of the south and interwoven glimpses into the past that give the film an air of aching nostalgia, Sparks makes several poignant arguments about fate and the search for one’s purpose in life. Though neither Amanda nor Dawson end up exactly where they anticipated they would as dreamy high school seniors, each finds that their life has begotten something better than they could have envisioned.

-Tyler Atwood