Movie Review: "The Longest Ride"

"The Longest Ride": B.  The Longest Ride treats us to two love stories for the price of one.  Sophia and Luke is the main event.  Sophia Danko (Britt Robertson) is a senior art major at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  All set to graduate in a couple of months, she has lined up a coveted internship with an art gallery in Manhattan.  Against her better judgment, she lets herself be dragged by a sorority sister to a bull riding event, where admiring the hunkiness of the young cowpokes trying to stay on a raging bull for eight seconds is the drawing card for the females in attendance.  One of those hunks is Luke Collins (Scott Eastwood, son of Clint), who a year ago sustained a near-fatal head injury compliments of a bull which had thrown, and then gored, him.  Tonight is his first time back in the competition.  Not only does he manage to stay on his mount for the required eight seconds, but (of course) he and Sophia meet very briefly when she retrieves his cowboy hat from the pen's dirt floor.  He tells her to keep it, as he saunters back to the holding area.

The undercard is the romance of Ruth and Ira.  On their way back to campus from their first date, Luke and Sophia spot a vehicle which has smashed through a bridge guard rail and plunged down a ravine. They rescue an older man trapped behind the wheel, along with a box of letters off his front seat, just before the car bursts into flames.  Luke and Sophia rush the man to an emergency room, and Sophia decides to stay there until he is stabilized.  On subsequent hospital visits by Sophia, we learn that the older man is Ira Levinson (Alan Alda), and the box he had been transporting contained letters which he had written over a span of decades to a woman named Ruth.  Each time Sophia visits Ira, he asks her to read some of the letters aloud, and as she does so, the movie transcends temporarily to a flashback detailing the Ira-Ruth relationship.

Each of the two couples faces hurdles.  Luke lives on a huge ranch with his widowed mother.  He is her only child, and her dream is for him to take over the operation from her some day.  But her biggest concern is his health, which is put at risk every time he competes as a bull rider.  He is one hard fall away from paralysis, yet his love for the sport makes it impossible to tear himself away.  Even though Sophia is attending college in North Carolina, she is not a country girl, and is not about to trade her dreams of an art-centric career in the big city for a life as the wife of a daredevil Carolina cowboy.  Similarly, they both realize there's not much of a calling for broncin' bull riders in the Big Apple.  Will the twain ever meet?

Ira (Jack Huston) and Ruth (Oona Chaplin) also connect while in their twenties.  He keeps sneaking peeks at her in the synagogue, not realizing she is aware of his gaze.  She finally makes the first approach, the flowers bloom, the birds sing, and love is in the air.  They become engaged right before he goes off to fight in World War II.  Ruth's parting words are an admonishment to stay safe.  More than anything, she looks forward to the day when the two of them can start that big family she's always dreamed about.  Will the Ira who returns from the battlefields be the same man she fell in love with? 

The Longest Ride has many of the accoutrements we've seen before in Nicholas Sparks stories.  Every girl in Sophia's sorority house is drop-dead gorgeous.  Luke has the highest cheekbones ever captured on film since Lauren Bacall.  He's like the Marlboro Man, only twenty-five years younger.  On their first date, Luke has picked out a picture postcard shoreline for a picnic, complete with table cloth, and naturally there is absolutely no one around to bother him and Sophia.  In the heat of battle, with bullets flying all around, Ira risks life and limb to rescue a fallen buddy as the Germans have them both in their sights.  (The script does not call for Ira winning the Congressional Medal Of Honor, however.)  In case you didn't think the two love stories were intertwined enough with Sophia's visits to old Ira's bedside, a preposterous ending -- not entirely unforeseen -- cements the connection.  We, the moviegoers, don't mind.  This is what we've come to expect from Sparks, and we're cool with it.