A WALK TO REMEMBER is both a refreshing and down-to-earth romantic movie where innocence has a place and forgiveness actually does happen. Nicholas Sparks, who wrote MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE, also wrote this and THE RESCUE.
Mandy Moore plays Jamie Sullivan, a "goody-two shoes" who really gets to know the "bad boy" Landon Carter, played by Shane West. Landon, responsible for getting another guy in a bad car wreck on a dare, must tutor students and take part in a school play production. While they knew one another all their lives, Jamie and Landon begin a real friendship together. This relationship becomes romantic, with a few twists that I won't give away here.
A WALK TO REMEMBER is actually a radical film. Our culture uses satire and irony as the most prevalent comments on society. Everyone's a cynic. The 1950s churned out this "family fare" where no one has any real problems and everyone's basically a good person. The 1950s turned into the 1960s, the polar opposite.
This movie takes those virtues such as faith, redemption, innocent, virginity, and forgiveness and puts them in the new millennium by dealing with actual issues. This is not the candy-caned world of Andy Griffith and that generation. This is a world where teenage pregnancy is common, alcohol abuse prevalent, and positive role models hard to come by. This is a world where there's of anger and hate.
A WALK TO REMEMBER gives us this world, but it is also a place where couples believe in sex only in marriage. It's where Bible-believing conservatives are real people who love one another and have an open mind, and their values are not given the stereotypical cynical slant. This is a movie that actually uses profanity for a purpose, to give texture and character, which most movies do not do. Most movies now days have profanity just to have it in there. A WALK TO REMEMBER uses profanity because the characters it describes would use profanity. Just as the it uses profanity to describe people, A WALK TO REMEMBER also gives us a young woman who truly believes in Christ, who loves her father dearly, and a young man who is touched very deeply by this young woman. In an age as cynical and skeptical as ours, this is indeed radical.
