Nights in Rodanthe

Directed by George C Wolfe. Starring Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Scott Glenn, James Franco PG cert, gen release, 97 min

**

WHY CAN'T Hollywood do proper weepies any longer? We do, it is true, get to see many films that make viewers want to cry (and pull out lumps of their hair and poke rusty needles in their eye), but those classic adventures in self- sacrifice - think Now Voyager, Random Harvest- have, long ago, climbed aboard the train and left us blubbering at the station.

What went wrong? Here's a suggestion. We all talk about our emotions too much these days. Just look at the ridiculous Nights in Rodanthe. The film, from a novel by the unstoppable Nicholas Sparks, finds Dr Richard Gere spending the weekend at a nauseatingly blue hotel perched perilously close to the ocean in some photogenic part of South Carolina.

The amiable Diane Lane, who is minding the establishment, quickly notices that all is not well with the silvery physician. He spends the evenings closeted alone in his room. He makes mysterious visits to a local sharecropper. He closes his eyes meaningfully and tips his head onto his chest with a promiscuous regularity that will surprise even veteran Gere watchers.

And so forth.Now, if this were 1945 and Lane were Bette Davis, the film would develop into a tense emotional standoff characterised by sexual and emotional repression. Eventually, a heartbreakingly unsatisfactory romantic compromise would result.

No longer. Gere has barely unfolded his pyjamas before he's unleashed a deluge of emotional diarrhoea. It seems his son doesn't love him because he's devoted too much time to work and too little to stroking kittens and helping spiders escape the bathtub (or something).

Inspired by his whinging, Lane then embarks on her own litany of misery: her teenage daughter is angry because Mom won't allow the paterfamilias, a balding philanderer, back into her life.

Blah, blah, blah! No wonder Gere is the only guest in the hotel. Everybody else, driven to despair by the whinging, weeping and hideous turquoise drapes, probably walked into the sea days ago.

To be fair, Nights in Rodantheis not absolutely the worst film in its glutinous genre. Like previous adaptations of Sparks's novels ( The Notebook, A Walk to Remember), the picture rations out a series of merciless emotional traumas that should draw the odd sob from even inveterate cynics. It is, moreover, hard to loathe a romantic drama whose two leads are both (let's do Gere a big favour here) over 40.

No amount of rationalisation can, however, excuse the monstrous dialogue. "Nothing can compare to the peaks and valleys I traced on your body," Doc Gere writes after venturing to a hilly locale in South America.

Yeugh! In a Bette Davis film he'd be eaten by head-hunters for daring to deliver such a clunker.