“Slow, slow it down,” Coldplay sings in “Us Against the World.” As one watches “The Longest Ride,” the newest Nicholas Sparks adaptation in theaters, the same words from the song by the British band come to mind.
“The Longest Ride” tells the story of two couples separated by generations. Ira (Jack Huston and Alan Alda) and Ruth (Oona Chaplin) met before World War II. Luke (Scott Eastwood) and Sophia (Britt Robertson) meet in the present day. The two stories begin intertwining when Luke rescues Ira from a car accident on a stormy evening. In the hospital, as Sophia reads Ira’s letters about Ruth, the two stories start to unfold.
The greatest irony in “The Longest Ride” is that it feels short and, worst of all, rushed. Things seem to happen too quickly, mainly in the present-day relationship. While this plot is expected of a Sparks film, the book shows things could have been much better.
This interlacing of stories enriches the narrative of the novel, but in the film everything becomes clumsy. The movie is edited in such a way that these transitions between past and present are announced in the most basic and obvious ways. In one scene, before a flashback, Ira looks to the side, staring at nothing, trying to clue in the audience about the flashback.
It is all far from necessary because visually, the movie already provides clues constantly. All the scenes from the past have beautiful tones of sepia. The characters are also vastly different in their looks. It is almost insulting from the part of screenwriter Craig Bolotin and director George Tilman Jr. to assume that an audience still needs the old, clichéd flashback clues.
In fact, one almost wishes time would not change. Everything about Ira and Ruth is greatly superior than the present day romance. The chemistry between the two actors makes the audience believe an actual love story is happening. How not to love the unspoken beauty of Ruth’s smile as well as the depth of her eyes or the cute shyness of Ira? Huston, Alda and Ruth act out the best scenes in the film.
This part of the story works so well that it is surprising to see the movie beginning at a bull riding competition. The snowy evening Ira spends at his car, stuck on the side of the road, is replaced by a rushed rain scene that never has the same visual power of the first pages of the book.
The bull riding events themselves never cause any true tension. The camera is often stable and everything is shot too perfectly. Hand-held shots, which could have captured more of the emotion of the sport, are completely absent. In place, there are GoPro style, point of view shots, which look more like the work of a YouTube amateur than that of a Hollywood director and cinematographer.
Director George Tillman Jr. seems afraid of letting his best scenes come to live. One of those happens when Luke and Sophia make love in the shower and Tillman captures everything through colorful pieces of glass that surround the bathroom. The effect is beautiful, but it goes away too quickly before even one could admire it.
This is the same issue with the movie as a whole. It goes by too quickly. It takes away the process of falling in love with all its mood swings – from tragedy to happiness and back – until we finally hear the “yes” that makes us feel complete again.
