This Valentine’s Day doesn’t come complete with the one cinematic offering that every romantic holiday should: a film based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. This year, we have to wait until April for the cowboy-tinged feature titled The Longest Ride, but fortunately the Sparks Industrial Complex has created plenty of other films to fill the gap. Since 1999, Sparks’s novels have spawned no less than nine films, all of them kitted out with various Sparksian tropes. From surprise cancer to pissed-off parents, Romeo and Juliet stories and Southern landscapes, Sparks knows what works for his audience, and every film puts just a slight twist on the formula.
Some of them, however, are much better than others.
9. The Best of Me
The latest cinematic offering culled from the Sparks oeuvre, this 2014 outing is rife with Mad Libs–styled Sparks elements that make it almost impossible to differentiate from any of his other films. Like a hideous Frankenstein’s monster of recycled plot points, The Best of Me has it all, from fated teenage sweethearts to disapproving parents, to kindly old people, to a merciless disease. There are car accidents and gardens and candlelit dinners. A dead child is a plot point. People are offered money to abandon their lovers. Someone drinks a lot and is a real jerk about it. It is also the only Sparks feature to include a subplot about meth dealers, so at the very least, it aims for an air of salacious, ripped-from-the-headlines debauchery.
Still, for all its kitchen-sink bits and pieces, the whole thing just doesn’t work. Maybe it’s that we’re supposed to believe that young Luke Bracey grows up to be old James Marsden or that, again, there’s a subplot about meth dealers. It’s probably just that the whole thing is retread and its apparent twists—disease-involved or not—can’t even jolt the most dedicated viewer.
8. The Last Song
First of all, big points to director Julie Anne Robinson for finding an actual singer (a pre-Bangerz Miley Cyrus) to star in this music-centric feature. Minus points for, well, everything else? At some point, Sparks decided that throwing in twists that involve death—and they always involve death—needed some extra pizazz to really make them pop off the screen (and jerk those tears), eventually pointing his death ray on peripheral characters. Yes, certain things about this narrative shake-up work, mostly in adding extra emotion without robbing our lovers of being together. Mainly, though, it just feels cheap, and nothing feels as cheap as Greg Kinnear’s character’s death (by cancer!) in this 2010 feature.
The entire film centers on Cyrus’s emotionally ill-equipped Ronnie, all raw nerves and angry faces, who is only broken down by the love of a good Hemsworth (Liam, not Chris). Despite some workable lessons about the power of love and the merit of really supporting people, Sparks upends the whole goddamn thing with sudden stomach cancer, painful for everyone.
7. Safe Haven
Sparks’s stories have always been preoccupied with ghosts, though the author’s ethereal beings have typically been of the purely psychological variety. So many of Sparks’s various heroes and heroines are the victims of memories that just won’t go away, emotional poltergeists that manifest as “secrets” and “lies” and “total misunderstandings that would really easily be cleared up by having a good chat.” The inevitable twist of many Sparks tales—if it’s not surprise cancer, because it’s often surprise cancer—is some sort of past occurrence that rears its ugly head at inopportune moments (like when our fated couple is finally about to embrace true happiness and/or make out in a country shed). Call it the Mrs. Rochester effect.
Rarely, however, has Sparks employed an actual ghost to further his narratives, which is what makes the twist of the 2013 feature film so shocking. It speaks to the disposability of Sparks’s supporting characters that no one ever really looked askance at Cobie Smulders’s Jo, a friendly neighborhood gal that only Julianne Hough’s Katie ever spoke to, allowing her to eventually reveal herself as not just a friendly ghost, but the ghost of Katie’s paramour’s dead wife. Also, there’s a fire, just for good measure.
6. Dear John
Oh, look, another film set on a beach and revolving around two lovestruck teenagers from opposite sides of the tracks. Are there actual train tracks in Dear John? There might as well be, because poor eponymous John (Channing Tatum) and dear sweet Savannah (Amanda Seyfried) are separated by so much, including Savannah’s inability to actually keep the faith. Could there be anything worse in a Sparks film than a romantic heroine who doesn’t trust in love?
Well, probably, because Savannah skips out on John via a letter—a letter!—so that she can marry her awkward neighbor, Tim (Henry Thomas, almost ludicrously miscast), and help care for his beloved autistic son. Sure, that sounds like an altruistic choice, and Seyfried’s sweetness very nearly sells it, but her world-class dumping of military hero John stings, and the back half of the film just feels wrong and off kilter. The shoehorning in of a 9/11 subplot doesn’t help matters.
5. The Lucky One
Sparks’s interest in military men might have been a tangential part of The Notebook, but it served as a looming plot point in both Dear John and The Lucky One, which hit theaters two years later. Forever consumed by the idea of everyday magic and twisted fate, Sparks’s 2012 feature combined those elements with . . . a military story and something about dogs?
Zac Efron plays a young Iraq war vet who believes that a good luck charm—a pretty picture of a woman he doesn’t know—is the key to his not dying in battle. Finally home in the U.S., Efron’s Logan walks (?) to Louisiana (?) with his dog (?) to find the lady in the picture, ultimately winning her over and having sex with her in an outdoor shower. It’s an actually steamy Sparks film, and Efron and co-star Taylor Schilling (in a pre–Orange Is the New Black role) have genuine, well, sparks. That the author broke just a smidge with tradition and violently killed off an actual bad guy during the course of the narrative was a genuine surprise, so hard to find in these Sparks stories, and one that gave the film the closest thing to a happy ending that Sparks is willing to dole out.
4. Nights In Rodanthe
It’s no coincidence that Sparks’s most adult outings—this and Message in a Bottle—are two of his best, simply because the older age of his protagonists demands more mature stories. Sure, Sparks may relish teen love and all its overly hormonal trappings, but the middle-aged need love, too, and they’d more than like to see it coming in a slightly fantastical package.
The third collaboration between leads Diane Lane and Richard Gere, Nights in Rodanthe includes real chemistry between its characters, something that’s surprisingly rare in Sparks films. So many of Sparks’s stories imagine that love is some sort of bubble, a thing that contains and protects (sometimes) a special combination of two chosen people, but Rodanthe actually went whole hog on this ideal, stranding its central pair at a romantic bed and breakfast for the majority of the narrative. Hey, who wouldn’t want that? Still, of course, there’s an unexpected death and an ugly little twist, but Rodanthe doesn’t balk at working through that stuff in an even-handed and grown-up way (wild horses and all).
3. A Walk to Remember
An unexpected blend of Sparks’s classic brand of love stories and a bad 90s teen flick, A Walk to Remember giddily plays with the whole “she’d be so cute if she ditched that bad hair and got good clothes” idea that sailed whole scads of rom-com ships, splicing in the additional caveat of “Oh, and also if she didn’t have cancer.” Sparks revels in bad teen behavior, and Shane West’s Landon Carter is a bad, bad teen. And he’s also so, so bored. Won’t someone think of poor, bad, attractive, bored Shane West? Enter Mandy Moore as Jamie Sullivan, an idealized version of the good girl who is so pure that she’s literally a minister’s daughter. Too bad about that cancer, though.
The 2002 feature film was only the second Sparks outing to hit the big screen—it arrived just three years after Message in a Bottle, which appealed to an older crowd—but it effectively served as an introduction to the kind of stories the author loves to tell. That surprise cancer thing has never quite worn off, just like his preoccupations with small-town living and ill-fated teen love. If there’s one film to blame for everything that came after it, it’s this one.
2. Message in a Bottle
Before there were “Nicholas Sparks movies,” there was Message in a Bottle, a 1999 high-concept romance for the older set that served as a predecessor for Nights in Rodanthe and not much else. It was the first Sparks book to be translated to the big screen, and it barely even scratched the surface of every trope Sparks ultimately has in his arsenal. Instead, it’s just a romance. A cheesy one, an overwrought one, but a nice one, a good-hearted one. Kevin Costner and Robin Wright topline the feature as a pair of, fine, yes, O.K., fated lovers who are brought together by the past. And also secrets.
Yes, this is a Sparks film through and through, but the then originality of seeing a pair of mostly well-meaning people taking a second chance on love overwhelms all of its other elements, leaving audiences with the kind of heartfelt story viewers of any age can cherish. Genuinely sad—and with a death that, at the time of its release, was actually surprising, the kind of punch Sparks can’t pack anymore—Message in a Bottle is never afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve, the mark of a real romance by any measure.
1. The Notebook
The gold standard. Sparks’s love of love has never been more apparent than in this big, gorgeous, gauzy Nick Cassavetes feature. Although all of the hallmarks of Sparks’s work are represented here—mad parents, dumbstruck young people, dunderheaded mix-ups, swans, wood-working—the over-the-top package works because it’s precisely the kind of rich fantasy that the romance genre needs on occasion. Punctuated by electric chemistry between its leads, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, and the kind of overwrought and impulsive tone that approximates love itself, The Notebook is so wild that it actually works.
And that subplot, good God. Sparks may unabashedly go for the tears at every turn—surprise cancer, remember?—but few of his medical dramas have stung as much as the one that plays out between James Garner and Gena Rowlands. Allie and Noah believed their love could do anything, and for the first time, we believed that, too.
