This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

If Mel Gibson is obsessed with suffering as some sort of Dark Ages redemptive penance, than Nicholas Sparks, on whose book the film Dear John is based, has a fetish for personal calamity, for creating sentimental, overly precious characters only to later squash them for maximum audience effect. Sparks is the shock artist who holds up an adorable kitten on stage, waits for the chorus of “ahhhhhhs” to die down and then drops it in a meat grinder. And still audiences return to his work time and again. In God’s name, why?

U.S. Army Sgt. John Tyree (Channing Tatum) is on leave in South Carolina visiting his father (the always superb Richard Jenkins) when he meets idealistic college student Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried) enjoying two weeks of Spring Break. John, a Special Forces soldier, is quiet and reserved, even in the face of belligerence. He knows who he is and doesn’t feel the need to prove it. He has a checkered past, but the Army has made him into a man, polishing off many of his sharp edges. Savannah comes from money, but doesn’t flaunt it. She spends her days helping disabled children and rebuilding hurricane-ravaged homes. John, who is smitten at first sight, thinks Savannah is too good for him. Perhaps, but her goodness will, paradoxically enough, be the source of the greatest pain he will ever know.

When John returns to his overseas unit and Savannah her studies, each begins a passionate letter writing campaign. As the years pass, their letters are like a paper tendril stretched across the ocean, binding them tightly to one another. They sustain John in the midst of dangerous deployments, one of which almost ends his life. But as the ambidextrous title of the film suggests, John will ultimately receive a letter that will crush his heart, alter the course of his life and lead to an outcome neither lover could have ever foreseen.

Sparks, who has enjoyed a spate of cinematic adaptations, including The Notebook and A Walk to Remember, has made a career out of making people cry. His works buck Hollywood happy endings and often conclude anywhere between bittersweet and outright tragedy. But rather than present a more realistic side of life and love, Sparks, who still dresses his stories in the same saccharine garments as the more conventional tales they resemble, has elevated a reclusive genre that can only be dubbed “tragedy porn,” popularized by such films as Love Story, Terms of Endearment and Beaches—a perverted simile every bit as unrealistic and twice as cruel.

I did not hate Dear John. I direct the following comments not at this film specifically, but at Sparks, and, indeed, at all those for whom tragedy is shtick, all those who sit at a blank computer screen and invent the tragedy first and the story second.

All art manipulates. That is its nature. That is its DNA. But I have nothing but roiling contempt for the artist who presumptuously assumes from the very first moment that his work is worthy of your tears, that he deserves your naked and flayed open soul, and that you are, ultimately, emotionally and intellectually incapable of resisting his preening machinations. When you traffic in tragedy, when your art cannot exist without, nay, is somehow powered by the tears of your audience, that is not melodrama, that is exploitation. And that makes you a fraud, a televangelist, a leech, a parasite shamelessly preying on the vulnerabilities of those who have been fooled into trusting you so that you might fill your stomach and line your pockets.

© Copyright 2010 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Cast: Channing Tatum, Amanda Seyfried, Richard Jenkins, Henry Thomas
Director: Lasse Hallström
Rated PG-13 for some sensuality and violence.
Running time: 105 minutes