GEORGE Tillman Jr’s film, from a novel by Nicholas Sparks, delivers more than merely the chronicle of a young man riding bucking bulls to offset the cost of running the family farm.
It tells two intertwined love stories beginning half a century apart.
The later story in time, first in the film, involves bull-riding rancher Luke (Scott Eastwood, son of Clint) and Sophia (Britt Robertson) finishing a fine-arts degree in expectation of an internship in a prestigious New York gallery.
The roots from which this relationship may burgeon (and they’re such a clean-cut couple that we hope it will) are moderately well established by the rainy night when they rescue an elderly man from a burning car. As a young man, storekeeper Ira (Jack Huston) and refugee from the Nazis in 1940 Ruth (Oona Chaplin, granddaughter of Oona and Charlie) were about to begin raising a family when a battlefield event mangled Ira’s clonkers.
So, no kids for Ira and Ruth. Instead, they buy modern impressionist paintings. Their (authentic) collection will loom large in the story after Ira (by this stage, Alan Alda) dies.
The film’s components make for good cinema, from the bull-riding arena – the bareback rider must remain on the wildly bucking, gyrating, animal for eight seconds – to Luke and Sophia’s friendship with Ira. Its emotional levels rise and fall often and far enough to energise our interest. Its dramatic structure verities are solid (although auto fanciers may quibble about some of the cars in the pre-war sequences). The paintings are splendid. I liked the film well.
At Hoyts, Palace Electric and Limelight
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