In the new romantic drama, Nights in Rodanthe, a couple makes love during the middle of a hurricane as the house around them almost flies apart, secret pasts are revealed in flashbacks filmed in soft light focus, and they exchange love letters with each other that sounds like the worst kind of material that would be written in a grocery store romance novel. Fortunately for the film and us, it features two bright leads in Richard Gere and Diane Lane. They may not be able to make the material work, but they at least make it a little more watchable than it would be if they weren't here.

The two have acted together in previous films (The Cotton Club and Unfaithful), so they obviously have an easy chemistry together in this cliched and highly predictable love story. Lane plays Adrienne Willis. She's a recent single mom who is under a lot of pressure from her unfaithful husband (Christopher Merloni) to give him another chance, and her two children (Mae Whitman and Charlie Tahan) basically blame her for the family splitting up in the first place. She gets a chance to escape her problems when her stereotypical black best friend (Viola Davis) who runs an old lakeside inn goes on a trip, and Adrienne is left to manage the inn while she's gone. The inn only has one guest, and it's Gere's character, a tortured and solemn surgeon named Paul Flanner who has come to the island to meet with someone and face his traumatic past. The two start to warm up to each other, and before long, they're involved with each other's personal affairs, and sending horribly written love letters to each other when they're apart.

Nights in Rodanthe is sensible enough when it is focusing only on the charming and warm bond that Gere and Lane share. They're comfortable with each other, and are able to get past moments where they make love to each other in the middle of a raging hurricane, despite only knowing each other for about two days by my estimate. But then it has to delve deep into the bowels of romance novel melodrama, and it turns into one eye-rolling moment after another. The dialogue gets sillier as it goes along, the characters become less warm and honest and almost start to resemble parodies of the people we met earlier in the film, and it simply tries too hard to jerk the tears from its audience. The entire movie is completely contrived and convoluted beyond belief, but the performances at least keep things slightly grounded. There's only so much that Gere and Lane can do, however, before the movie begins to sink in its own pit of sappy emotions and tears that it digs for itself.

Despite all of its efforts to evoke emotion, the movie is a surprisingly dry and passionless affair. We eventually find out why Dr. Paul Flanner is so tortured and forlorn in his early scenes, and while the revelation would be heartbreaking in a more assured film, here it never quite works. I was in a fairly packed theater for a Tuesday afternoon, and I did not hear a single nose being blown or anyone reaching for their Kleenex. (Though I did hear some during the film's all-too predictable climax.) The romance and sparks that the two lead characters are supposed to be experiencing are never quite strong enough, and the entire film has a strangely laid back and muted feel. I never felt for the characters as much as I should, and that's just not what you want in a movie like this. The performances are there, but the passion is not.

I'm not going to complain about Nights in Rodanthe being a chick flick tear jerker, because that's what it is, and I knew that walking in. The problem I have is that it's not a very good or even a memorable one. For all of its soft focus-lit flashbacks accompanied by tearful piano music and the sometimes laughable romantic dialogue, the movie just never connects on any sort of emotional level. All this movie leaves us with is two good performances, a lot of romantic ham, and a whole lot of cheese.

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