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'Nights in Rodanthe'

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BY JOHN ANDERSON | Special to Newsday

September 26, 2008

Diane Lane's character cheated on Richard Gere's in the overrated "Unfaithful" of 2002, so why their reunion would provide a romantic pedigree to the clumsy "Nights in Rodanthe" is a mystery. So is the mental process of onetime Public Theater titan George C. Wolfe, who accomplishes a neat trick in his miscarriage of the Nicholas Sparks novel: It feels like a play, and it feels like a TV commercial. He has avoided cinema entirely. Bravo!

Lane achieves her own neat trick, which isn't a trick at all: She is most affecting when she's on her own, free of the Anne Peacock-John Romano script and into a zone of pure emotion (which echoes the best moment of "Unfaithful"). Having made one more bad career choice - of which there may be few for an actress of Lane's age, despite her looks - she is at odds with the dialogue she has to deliver. She plays Adrienne, a harried mother whose husband (Christopher Meloni) has left her, then announced he wants back in, and is using their children as leverage. Retreating to a friend's family inn on the storm-battered North Carolina coast, she acts as host, then lover, to the brooding Paul (Gere), who has come to visit the husband of a patient he lost during a routine operation. Both are the answer to each other's dreams. For the rest of us, Rodanthe is the Death Valley of erotic illusion.

(PG-13)

PLOT Two troubled and implausibly available adults of a certain age collide romantically as a hurricane bears down on their otherwise unoccupied North Carolina inn.

CAST Diane Lane, Richard Gere, Christopher Meloni, Viola Davis

LENGTH 1:37

PLAYING AT Area theaters

BOTTOM LINE Paralytic direction by George C. Wolfe and a script that might have come with a box of crayons provide the always attractive Lane and Gere nothing much to do.