I well remember the phrase that Love Story, Arthur Hiller's 1971 youth-cult weepie, made famous. No, not "Being in love means never having to say you're sorry", since that film made it plain that it was "being wealthy" that removed this obligation. The phrase I recall drawing a huge guffaw from all us cynical critics was "Hold me tight, Olly", spoken by the dying Ali MacGraw to her bereft boyfriend, Ryan O'Neal.
In A Walk to Remember - a similar story about young lovers, or in this case young marrieds, for they get to the altar, being untimely parted by mortality - the line that rocked us was "I've got leukaemia." It's spoken by Mandy Moore, playing a minister's daughter who wears maxi-skirts and a cardy on campus and studies her Bible on the school bus. She moans it to her young lover and one-time tearaway Shane West, who's so besotted by her goodness and uniqueness that he's named one of the stars in heaven after her before she can even get there.
A Walk to Remember strives strenuously to emulate Love Story; I felt I heard Erich Segal, author of that lachrymose aberration in a violent decade, at this week's press screening taking notes to support a suit for plagiarism. He'd lose, actually: unlike his own dazzling exercise in serving both Mammon and Hymen (young lovers cutting free to follow their hearts' desire, but not so free as to forget the way to the bank), A Walk to Remember is a movie of stupefying banality, its dialogue reduced to the sort of shy undertones that dumb movie-makers like director Adam Shankman believe signify romantic feelings, or lump-in-the-throat whispers as the death scene rears its cosy head off the pillow. The kids in it look like the male models on teenmag covers; the campus town is a museum piece of picturesqueness; the wedding scene is ecumenical kitsch; the whole purpose is to hand kiddy film-goers from, say, aged nine to 15 a sentimental lollipop to suck on.
Those film critics who manufacture quotes to order for the posters will probably alchemise its gooey phoneyness into fulsome phrases such as "a date flick". The only date it kept for me was with the old double-standard of the girl or woman who must be sacrificed so that the boy or man can be redeemed.
A Walk To Remember
Cert: certPG
