The Last Song
- Directed by Julie Ann Robinson
- Written by Nicholas Sparks and Jeff Van Wie
- Starring Miley Cyrus, Greg Kinnear and Liam Hemsworth
- Classification: PG
Arguably as much a business merger as a movie, The Last Song brings together two pop-culture powerhouses - 17-year-old singer-actress Miley Cyrus (Forbes magazine's No. 29 on its list of the most powerful celebs last year) and author Nicholas Sparks (Forbes's No. 10 top-earning author in 2008). The goal of this Disney-commissioned match is to ease Cyrus from kid star into romantic lead, with the result's more business-savvy than emotionally satisfying.
In a role that echoes both the singer's real life and her Hannah Montana role as a second-generation musician, Cyrus plays Ronnie, a rebellious piano prodigy, with Greg Kinnear in the role of her father and music teacher. Instead of sitcom shenanigans, this time we get grown-up melodrama, as screenwriter Sparks ( The Notebook, A Walk to Remember) employs his usual story elements - new love, death and recovered letters - in a formula that might best be described as feel-good tragedy. Given that this is a Sparks story, you wait for the heavy foot of fate to drop and force the characters to realize that life is more precious than they thought.
Kinnear plays a composer named Steve Miller (no, not the guy who wrote The Joker and Take the Money and Run) who lives in an artfully rundown beachfront house on Georgia's Tybee Island. Steve looks rumpled and misty-eyed, and wears the perpetual three-day stubble of a man too preoccupied to shave.
Three years ago, Steve left New York, as well as his wife and two kids, Ronnie and her little brother Jonah (Bobby Coleman). Now the kids have been sent from their New York home to spend the summer with their father while their mother (Kelly Preston) prepares to remarry.
Precocious oddball Jonah is delighted to help Steve rebuild a stained-glass window for the church that caught fire last year but big sister Ronnie is sulking, as we can tell by her dark clothes and nose stud. She has recently been arrested for shoplifting and is planning on turning down her piano scholarship to Juilliard.
English television director Julie Ann Robinson ( Weeds, Big Love) does a serviceable job in establishing the beach-resort social milieu, with its upper-crust townies and local low-lifes, but verisimilitude is soon sacrificed as the plot begins to pull the melodramatic strings. On her first night at her father's house, Ronnie ditches her family at a local fair, hangs out with some bad kids and comes home late. The next day, while walking on the beach, she gets knocked over by handsome, muscular, obscenely wealthy volleyball jock Will (Aussie actor Liam Hemsworth).
When Will makes a play for her, Ronnie brushes him off. Later, they discover they have common interests, like reading Tolstoy and tending a nest of loggerhead sea-turtle eggs. Many music-filled montages of beach and forest frolicking follow.
The Last Song is chock-a-block with narrative red herrings - the mystery of the burned church, the trauma that has damaged Will's parents into characters out of the Dallas TV series and the dire warning from Will's former girlfriend. All these are excuses for Ronnie and Will's repeated breakups and reconciliations, and yet more montages.
Most of this is blandly palatable, at least for the first half. Cyrus, though she seldom strays from her two primary modes, pouting rebel or toothy girlfriend, has a winning on-screen presence, if only for her enjoyably abrasive edge in this deep well of pathos. Ultimately though, the pop star's bottomless pool of spunkiness isn't enough to buoy a script that sinks right past ordinary sentimentality to sadism. A key plot point, revealed after the halfway mark, involves the author, and a central character, inexplicably withholding essential information to artificially up the emotional ante. Perhaps feel-good tragedy doesn't quite capture it; feel-good sadism might be more like it.