The Longest Ride Is Not Nicholas Sparks's First Rodeo

The Longest Ride is Nicholas Sparks’s most ambitious novel. Instead of one couple, there’s two — and he’s even stretched out of his blond/Southern/Christian comfort zone to make the older pair Jewish. For balance in the film version of The Longest Ride, and for pandering to the powerful conservative audience who made American Sniper a megahit, his young heartthrob is a blond Southern bull rider named Luke Collins who lives on a ranch with his mama. Even cannier, Luke’s played by Clint Eastwood’s son, Scott Eastwood, who pairs his daddy’s crinkle-cut eyes with abs you could use as a cattle guard.

Luke is a hero on the Professional Bull Riders circuit, a three-time champion forced to take a year-long break after a monster named Rango gored him in Las Vegas. Director George Tillman Jr. makes full use of the lights, black leather and glamour of this modern breed of rock-and-roll riders.

In a near-deadly meet-cute, Luke completes a successful eight-second ride, gets chased to the railing by a beast, and locks eyes with an art student named Sophia (Britt Robertson), dragged there by her sorority sisters to slum it with some sexy wranglers. When he loses his cowboy hat, she picks it up — the modern inversion of a mademoiselle dropping her handkerchief — and at the after-hoedown, he adjusts the brim on her head and offers to buy Sophia a domestic beer.

The two have nothing in common except golden good looks and a fondness for grinning at each other. Still, Robertson and Eastwood do that well enough that we buy their chemistry. Soon enough, she decides that pop music gives her headaches and switches the radio to country. But it’s harder to give up her plan to move to Manhattan after graduation, even though Luke fits in as well with her art-world friends as Crocodile Dundee.

Tillman has fun contrasting an old-fashioned gentleman like Luke with the frat bros at Sophia’s college. But even Luke could learn a love lesson from widower Ira Levinson (Alan Alda), who literally crashes into their lives with a box of love letters he wrote to his wife, Ruth, a Jewish immigrant from Vienna, from 1940 until her death. Jack Huston and a ferociously vibrant Oona Chaplin play Ira and Ruth in flashbacks where they have to tangle with traumas larger than Luke’s lack of a college education. After Ira and Ruth are engaged, he’s shipped off to World War II, where he’s shot someplace vague that makes him sterile. Instead of children, they collect modern art, a plot thread fated to tie in to Luke and Sophia’s romance.

It’s easy to tease a Nicholas Sparks movie. It’s harder to admit that he’s good at his niche — and has a string of ten films, nearly all profitable, to prove it, even if every one has been savaged by critics. He’s thoroughly uncynical about love, like a nineteen-year-old child bride doodling hearts on her wedding invitations.

The Longest Ride’s emphasis is on choice, not fate or coincidence. The people at its center are kept apart not by scheming bad guys or boneheaded misunderstandings, but by a genuine concern for each other’s happiness. In the end, Ira could no more pressure Ruth into a life without children than Luke can ask Sophia to give up her career.