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<\/a>\nDawson Cole is a boy from the wrong side of the tracks.\u00a0 But unlike his father and brothers, he has a good heart, is a good person and wants to break away from the criminal ways of the \u201cfamily business\u201d.\u00a0 Dawson also suffers severe physical abuse at the hands of his father who believes him to be worthless and good for nothing. Handsome and good looking, yet extremely shy, it\u2019s easy to understand why he catches the eye of Amanda Collier.\u00a0 A girl from the monied right side of the tracks, Amanda is confident, independent, vocal in her opinions and views and has her life planned out with meticulous detail, right down to the names of future children.\u00a0 Amanda also always gets what she wants and she wants Dawson.<\/p>\n
Thanks to a little sweet sneakiness, Amanda gets Dawson\u2019s attention and his heart, but not without facing seemingly insurmountable odds along the way.\u00a0 Her family disapproves of him.\u00a0 His family disapproves of her.\u00a0 But then there\u2019s Tuck.\u00a0\u00a0 Former military, local mechanic, Tuck is recently widowed.\u00a0 Still puttering in his wife\u2019s beloved garden tending her flowers with all the love possible, it\u2019s easy to see that she was the love of Tuck\u2019s life and her passing has left a vast emptiness in his heart.\u00a0 It\u2019s because of their love that Tuck firmly believes in love, true love.<\/p>\n
After running away from home after a violent incident at the hands of his father, Dawson takes refuge in Tuck\u2019s garage.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t take long before both Dawson and Tuck get a second chance, with each filling an emptiness in the other.\u00a0 Tuck becomes the father Dawson should have had and always wanted while Dawson the son that now fills the loneliness of Tuck\u2019s life.\u00a0 And Tuck believes in the love between Amanda and Dawson.<\/p>\n
But the course of true love never does run smooth and tragedy strikes for Dawson and Amanda, ripping them apart for 20 years.\u00a0 Amanda has gone on to marry and has a college-aged son.\u00a0 Dawson works on oil rigs in the Gulf.\u00a0 They have never spoken in all these years; in fact, neither even knows if the other is even alive.\u00a0 But on Tuck\u2019s death, the two are reunited thanks to Tuck\u2019s foresight and wisdom that time heals all wounds; and that Amanda and Dawson still belong together.\u00a0 Is their love still there?\u00a0 Can they rekindle the magic that once was?\u00a0 Should they?\u00a0 Or will Fate play yet another unseen hand?<\/p>\n As the adult Amanda and Dawson, Michelle Monaghan and James Marsden are pure magic.\u00a0 As the young Amanda and Dawson, Liana Liberato and Luke Bracey are incandescent and melt even the coldest and most cynical heart with a grounded, naturalness to them.\u00a0 While the physical similarities between the generational couples are believable, it is the emotional level of performances that solidify Monaghan and Liberato, Marsden and Bracey.\u00a0 Never in the same scenes together, each still manages to capture the essence of performance and emotion of the other generation, creating a seamless mesh that transcends time.\u00a0 It\u2019s a testament to all four actors and particularly Liberato and Bracey who set the tone and carry the bulk of screen time with establishing the story.\u00a0\u00a0 If Liberato and Bracey don\u2019t work together, don\u2019t click, have no chemistry, not only doesn\u2019t the story work but the characters of Amanda and Dawson fall flat and waste anything that Monaghan and Marsden might do.\u00a0 A tricky balancing act, but the performances are so solid, so rooted in honest emotion and obvious chemistry that the love soars.\u00a0\u00a0 Notable is that Bracey was ultimately cast after testing with Liberato who, on questioning by director Hoffman, declared Bracey \u201cthe best kisser.\u201d\u00a0 (It\u2019s Liberato\u2019s first love scenes on film, she may as well play opposite the best!)<\/p>\n Turning to each performance individually, each actor brings something distinctive to their role.\u00a0 Liana Liberato is luminous.\u00a0 The camera loves her.\u00a0 Liberato has a spunky freshness that has matured over the past few years as she finds her performance footing.\u00a0 Watching her move through a variety of roles in films like \u201cTrust\u201d, \u201cTrespass\u201d and \u201cErased\u201d, Liberato comes into her own in THE BEST OF ME with her first love story and love scenes, including first on-screen kiss, all set against some powerful dramatic gravitas.\u00a0 Equally notable is Luke Bracey.\u00a0 We recently saw him tacitly stoic opposite Pierce Brosnan in \u201cThe November Man\u201d but here as Dawson, Bracey finds a youthful insecurity that grows into confident strength melded with a playfulness when going toe-to-toe with Liberato.<\/p>\n Without disclosing some of the plot twists of THE BEST OF ME, suffice to say that James Marsden is still every woman\u2019s Prince Charming, and with Michelle Monaghan\u2019s Amanda that is no different.\u00a0\u00a0 Now his second turn in a Nicholas Sparks adaptation finds that \u201cOne of the nice things about this movie is that, for me, as humans we like to look at the road not travelled and it\u2019s easy to sort of romanticize what that might have been and could your life be richer or more fulfilled had you take a left instead of a right.\u201d\u00a0 Marsden captures that wonder and questioning to a tee.<\/p>\n As for Monaghan, describing how the script \u201ctouched me\u201d on first reading it, she brings an emotional arc to Amanda that shows character growth in a minimal amount of time while adding touchstones of youthful fun that are welcoming and mirroring the tone of Liberato.\u00a0 \u201cI loved this character because she was complicated and she was conflicted.\u00a0 I think that there\u2019s this part of her [where] she\u2019s lost and from the outside she looks like she\u2019s got the ideal life but truly there\u2019s something missing inside as a result of all of this life experience.\u00a0 I loved what Liana had done in terms of her performance and what she created and established for the role.\u00a0 It really allowed me the opportunity to go on this emotional journey with having to rediscover those aspects and those characteristic.\u00a0 It was nice for the character to be a little lost, to have a little restraint and then be able to be emotionally impactful. . .\u201d<\/p>\n A real gift to THE BEST OF ME is Gerald McRaney.\u00a0 Not only is McRaney\u2019s performance as Tuck key to propelling the story and setting the defining tone for love and integrity, but McRaney makes Tuck (like McRaney himself) the very definition of \u201csalt of the earth\u201d; and not just in THE BEST OF ME, but among all of Sparks\u2019 characters and books.\u00a0 Working only in scenes opposite leads Liberato and Bracey, there is an onscreen paternal\/grandfatherly mentorship and love that radiates.\u00a0 These three together are like watching a beautiful ballet of ethereal emotion and unconditional love.<\/p>\n Strong supporting work comes from Clarke Peters as Tuck\u2019s attorney Morgan Dupree, Sebastian Arcelus as Amanda\u2019s golf obsessed alcoholic husband Frank and Sean Bridgers who strikes fear every moment he is on screen as Dawson\u2019s father Tommy Cole.<\/p>\n Truly a love story on so many levels as opposed to just being filled with romance or star-crossed lovers, THE BEST OF ME encompasses multiple layers and colors of love – young love, innocent love, parent-child love, love of a friend, surrogate parent love, mature love, love of a lifetime love, eternal love, second chance love.\u00a0 I loved the book, but the film surpasses the printed word thanks to the vision of director Michael Hoffman and screenwriters Will Fetters and J. Mills Goodloe.<\/p>\n Capitalizing on Sparks\u2019 gift for transcending time with everlasting love, Hoffman not only embraces the idea of an eternal love and second chances, but flips the printed word on its ear, focusing on the origins of that love through the young Amanda and Dawson. Where the book spends much of its pages on the adult Amanda and Dawson and their regrets and reminiscences, Hoffman has us fall in love with the young high-school Amanda and Dawson and their love story.\u00a0 We watch it unfold, thus giving more gravitas to the \u201c20 years later\u201d aspect of the story.\u00a0\u00a0 The youthful story also provides a foundation for the different types of love to which Amanda and Dawson are exposed, adding depth to the adult personas. Thanks to this flipped structure and the detailed insight into youthful dreams, familial influences and the dreams of what is yet to come, we are able to embrace these as yet unjaded characters and even drift back in time to our own youthful ebullience and truly celebrate the idea of \u201csecond chances\u201d.\u00a0 Seminal dialogue from the book is also faithfully incorporated into the script.<\/p>\n Significant is also a shift in visual tone as Hoffman moves the setting of the film from North Carolina, opening a wealth of visual wonders, each more beauteous than the last.\u00a0 Calling on cinematographer Oliver Stapleton, together the two create a naturalistic look.\u00a0 Shooting digitally but widescreen with anamorphic lenses, the framing of each shot is classic.\u00a0 Electing to shoot on sticks as opposed to a lot of hand-held camera work, Hoffman and Stapleton make the most of the shallow depth of field created with the anamorphic lenses for a lovely separation of background and foreground.\u00a0 Keeping a lightness to the lensing and using to its best advantage natural lighting that captures the play of sun off a muddy creek or twinkling through low hanging Spanish Moss, Hoffman also uses sun flares to create some beautiful visual effects, particularly in dreamlike sequences with Liberato.\u00a0 Beautifully elegant simplicity.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n