The Choice

The Choice is quite possibly the worst romantic melodrama I have seen in a long time.  The fact that it comes from the mind of the master of the genre, Nicholas Sparks, is particularly shocking.  There have been a couple good movies made off of Sparks' books (The Notebook being the gold standard), and yes, there have been plenty that have missed the mark.  But this movie is so lazy as to be mind boggling.  It plays like Sparks became sick of this story and these characters long before the audience does.

In a movie this bad, it's sometimes hard to know where to start.  But, since this is supposed to be a love story, let's start with the young couple at the center of it all.  Meet Travis (Benjamin Walker) and Gabby (Teresa Palmer).  The fact that these characters have little chemistry together on screen is the least of their problems.  They start the film out as next door neighbors who can't stand each other.  He passes himself off as a slacker who likes to throw wild barbecue parties and blast music really loud.  He's shallow, immature and obnoxious, but we know he has a good heart and a painful past, because the movie frequently shows him sitting on a chair on his front yard, staring at the moon at night.  She's a studious medical student with a steady doctor boyfriend (Tom Welling), and is frequently annoyed by Travis' boorish behavior.  The two are forced to come together when Gabby's dog gets pregnant.  She thinks his dog is responsible.  He recommends a good local vet, and it turns out the vet is Travis' father (the usually reliable Tom Wilkinson, who plays his scenes here as if he lost a bet).  Turns out that Travis works at his dad's practice also.

From this point on, Travis starts popping up in every aspect of Gabby's life.  Just like the villain in a mad slasher movie, he can appear anywhere at any time.  Gabby does her best to resist his charms, but then her boyfriend has to suddenly leave for a few weeks.  As soon as the boyfriend is out of the picture, Gabby finds herself wistfully watching Travis from afar as he works on fixing his boat in the front yard with his shirt off.  Before long, he's inviting her to come along and party with him and his friends.  And even sooner after that, he's taking her on romantic motorcycle rides, and she's inviting him to her house for dinner.  Immediately after dinner and some small talk, they're having PG-13 sex on the kitchen table.  Now Gabby is so in love with this man, she's ignoring the voice mail messages that her respectable boyfriend is leaving on her cell phone.

In the audience, we're wondering how the movie is going to handle the whole boyfriend situation.  After all, Travis knows right from the start that Gabby is involved with someone.  He even meets him once in an early scene, and sees them together.  So, how does the movie handle it?  Do Gabby and Travis even talk about this complication while they're embarking in love making and going to private spots to gaze at the stars together?  Nope, they don't even talk about this elephant in the room once the entire time.  It's not until the boyfriend returns early from his business trip, and invites Gabby out to dinner that it even comes up.  They happen to be dining at the same restaurant where Travis is drinking at the bar.  Travis sees them, storms out, and Gabby follows after him, leaving her boyfriend and the boyfriend's parents behind in the restaurant.  The two argue for a while, and then Gabby storms back inside the restaurant.  In the next scene, through voice over narration, we learn that Gabby told her boyfriend about Travis, and he broke up with her.  Uh-huh.

So now, we get some tense moments where it looks like Gabby and Travis are too angry with each other to talk and make up.  We get some contrived misunderstandings, such as Gabby sees Travis sitting outside his house with an ex-girlfriend, but it turns out he was really telling her they have no chance of ever getting back together.  Eventually, it gets to the point that Travis just can't stand being apart from Gabby, and he goes to her parents' house, where she's currently staying.  He storms into their house, forcing his way in, and tells her he loves her and wants to marry her.  How does she take it?  She's annoyed, actually.  How do her parents take it?  They are so immediately smitten by this total stranger they have never met who has broken into their house to propose to their daughter that her mother actually takes her wedding ring off her finger, and gives it to Travis so that he can propose to her daughter with it.  This is enough to make Gabby change her tune, and realize that Travis has always been the man for her all this time.  She accepts his proposal, and in a particularly rushed series of events, they are married, have two children, and live out their days in total bliss.  Even their dogs seem to be getting close to each other. 

Why the rush all of a sudden?  Well, this is a Nicholas Sparks story, and the movie is well over past an hour by this point.  It has to hurry up and get to the inevitable third act crisis where some kind of disease or accident will cause one of the young lovers to be at death's door for the last half of the film.  The fact that the movie's very first scene is one of the lovers walking sad-faced in a hospital with a bouquet of flowers, and then the movie flashes back to how the couple met is a dead give away that tragedy awaits this couple in the future.  Of course, this also happens in every single story Sparks has ever written.  The lovers he writes about develop cancer so frequently, that the Cancer Treatment Institute should start getting a cut from his movie and book profits.  This time, however, a car accident is to blame for the lovers possibly being separated.  This is where the titular choice comes in, as the survivor must decide whether or not to keep the other on life support, or end their suffering.

I understand that I have spent this entire review just recapping the plot.  That's because I simply sat in my seat, astonished at what I was watching.  It isn't so much that this is an impossibly simplistic look at relationships, it's more how uninterested in itself this movie seems.  It's completely going through the motions, and never even tries to make us care about what's going on up on the screen.  The lovers at the center of it all lack chemistry, and don't get to spend enough scenes together to make us want to see them happy.  In fact, they come across as quite horrible people in the way they completely discard Gabby's boyfriend, who not only clearly loves her, but has nothing but the best intentions for her.  I suppose a smarter movie could have handled this situation tactfully, but this movie is about as tactful and subtle as a tank blasting a school bus.  There's not a single moment here that is believable or that real couples can relate to.  It's a fantasy, and a lazy one at that.  I understand that people go to these movies to get wrapped up in the fantasy.  But when the movie itself doesn't even seem to care about that simple notion, it's an awkward experience.

The Choice seems to be a sign that even Sparks himself is getting tired of writing the same love story over and over.  I understand he's got a lucrative deal going on, but if this is the kind of stuff he's going to churn out, maybe it's time to slow down or stop completely.  People will come to this movie looking for some romantic escapism, and all they'll get is a cold and cynical experience by a writer who doesn't believe in what he writes about anymore.

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