“People make mistakes… even the people that we love.”
If you know me you’ll know I’ll watch anything with Miley in and my expectations come relatively high. For some reason I winced a little, as I often do, on hearing that this was based on a Nicholas Sparks novel, before quickly remembering he was also the source of The Horse Whisperer and A Walk to Remember, both of which I love.
This a story that’s been done a million times before, and part of it came to me fairly unexpected. Miley plays your typical unruly teen moving in with her estranged dad after getting into trouble at her old home. The father/daughter thing immediately reminded me of Fly Away Home and Save the Last Dance – regarding the former, there’s even a little wildlife subplot here, with Miley discovering and protecting a bunch of turtles on the nearby beach; regarding the latter, the rebellious teen’s misguided attempts to ingratiate herself with the neighbourhood peers, not to mention of course the reluctance to pursue a once shining potential in an artistic field. The catch here is, daddy’s dying.
It’s a gigantic cheesy cliché in the end, but you’d be kind of foolish to not expect as much. I wanted this movie to make me cry, and ultimately it did (even on a second viewing). There’s something about a girl playing piano for her daddy at his funeral that’s almost as unerringly pure to me as I’ve always said a girl on a horse is in a movie, it just can’t fail to move. Miley can definitely act – I’ve been rewatching Hannah Montana from the start recently in the run-up to its last episodes, and to compare her work here with her work in early episodes of her TV show is to see a girl whose talent has grown fast. I know there’ll be some read that and simply refuse to believe it but really, do the comparison. Even if you still don’t think she can act her way out of a paper bag, you can’t deny that she’s improving. If you’re a fan, you don’t need to be told this. But if you’re not, trust me, her movie work is not as abrasive as you think.


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