The Last Song

The Last Song (2010) is about a teenage girl made to spend the summer with her father. Ronnie is a gifted pianist; Juilliard has accepted her and she refuses to go. The reason is her father: she has not spoken to him since her parents separated, and has not touched a piano either. Her mother sends her and her brother to Georgia for the summer. Steve lives in a house on the beach and is rebuilding a stained glass window for the church. Ronnie speaks to nobody. Then she meets someone protecting a nest of turtle eggs from raccoons on the beach, and the summer opens from there. In the second half something emerges about her father and the story changes genre. Nicholas Sparks wrote the screenplay and the novel at the same time. Unusually, the screenplay came first; the novel was finished while the film was shooting and published a few months before it. Sparks said openly that he wrote it for Miley Cyrus. She was trying to move on from children's television at the time and this was her first dramatic role. It was shot on Tybee Island in Georgia. Liam Hemsworth made his first American film here; the two met during the shoot and a relationship of many years began. Greg Kinnear plays the father and has the best work in it. Critics disliked it; it did well commercially. The final section is close to emotional manipulation and the score presses it further. It runs 107 minutes. Good for: teenage drama, Sparks adaptations, and family stories. Less good for: illness and death are heavy in it, the ending is predictable, and the sentiment is very high.