Lyle Lovett has a song called “Walk Through the Bottomland,” about a lady from New Jersey who won the heart of a cowboy who rode on the rodeo-it is concise, haunting and beautiful. “The Longest Ride” is also about a Jersey girl and her cowpoke, but it is an interminable melodrama without pain, full of sugar pills instead of painkillers.
Britt Robertson’s Sophia, a college senior whose love of art is revealed by her Van Gogh-inspired desk chair, meets Scott Eastwood’s Luke at a regional bull-riding event. They’re already well on their way to love when they pull the befuddled Ira (Alan Alda) out of a ditch and help him to the hospital. His only possession is (inevitably for a Nicholas Sparks adaptation) a box of letters, to be read aloud while he recovers. These missives are, quite helpfully, complete written narratives of the sepia-toned WWII-era romance between young Ira (Jack Huston) and Ruth (Oona Chaplin).
The parallel plotlines roll earnestly along but the film sounds false – Eastwood bluffs a North Carolina drawl, Chaplin tries a disastrous Viennese inflection and Huston has an even harder accent to master: the Alan Alda.
For Sophia, loving Luke means giving up a job offer at a gallery in Manhattan – he is so contemptuous of city life he could spit. “What am I going to do – go to brunch?” She accedes to his wishes because, in Sparks’ world, love is more important than agency and real men begin their days with coffee and Percocets.
Even the scenes of Luke riding bulls are overwrought – the eight seconds he needs to spend aboard the beast are drawn out in slack montages, useless unless you love a good slo-mo of bull spittle, swinging for the camera in wide arcs like the florid script on a Hallmark condolence card.
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“The Longest Ride” is showing at the Sonoma 9 Cinemas. Rated PG-13 and running time is 2:02. Visit cinemawest.com.
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