REVIEW: 'Dear John' represents the worst kind of 'tragedy porn'

GRADE: C-

DEAR JOHN

Cast: Channing Tatum, Amanda Seyfried, Richard Jenkins, Henry Thomas

Director: Lasse Hallström

Theaters: Hollywood, Tinseltown,
Carmike, Chapel Hills, Cinemark,

Rated: PG-13 (for some sensuality and violence)

Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

If Mel Gibson is obsessed with suffering as some sort of redemptive penance, then 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, in effect, 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 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.

But as the film’s title 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 foreseen.

Sparks, who has enjoyed a spate of cinematic adaptations, has made a career out of making people cry. His works buck Hollywood happy endings and often conclude somewhere 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 more conventional tales, 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 at Sparks, and at all those for whom tragedy is shtick, all those who invent the tragedy first and the story second.

All art manipulates. I have nothing but roiling contempt for the artist who presumptuously assumes from the 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 is powered by the tears of your audience, it’s not melodrama, but exploitation.