SAFE HAVEN

Remarkably insulting to the viewer, this movie assumes you know nothing about anything. However, in case you want to know how not to behave in a crisis, here are some key points:

If your husband is abusing you, do not seek help or call 911. Instead, wait until he tries to strangle you, then plunge a knife into his back. When you see him bleeding on the floor, run for it. Continue not to call 911, but go to a neighbor’s house and ask her to assist you in flight. After all, he might get up, rinse off the blood and race after you to the bus station where you have stuffed a plastic bag full of everything you own under your shirt so that you look pregnant.

You’d better run, because he’s a cop and he is able, on his sole and own authority to put out a nationwide APB on you, accompanied by a Wanted Poster with your picture that says you have been charged with First Degree Murder. He can do this even though no one has died and you have not been charged with anything. No one in any of the thousands of police offices around the country will want to know details, and his own superiors will not discover this nonsense for months. When they do, nothing more will be said than, “Give me your gun and your badge,” as if he doesn’t have another weapon. No messages will be sent to any police agencies around the country to indicate that the poster is false. No one will worry that a creep of this caliber is likely to keep trying to find his runaway wife and that, if he does find her, he might not be super sweet about it.

When you arrive in a little North Carolina town with a plastic bag full of clothes and nowhere to stay, you will sleep under the pier at the beach. The next day, you will look fresh and happy and be able to get a job by asking at a diner. The owner will say, “I might could find you something,” which was the most believable moment in the film—not that there would be work available, but that, if there were, this is how a lady in a North Carolina diner would say so.

The owner of the diner will hire you even though you go by “Katie” with no last name, and have no identification and no social, so you can’t fill out a W-4. Does Mr. Sparks think we will let all this slide right on by? Would you hire someone who could give you no last name? Would you rent her a house?

The realtor in North Carolina did. She rented a house (apparently for cash) to a young woman with no last name, no car, no luggage, no credit check, no identification, and no bank account. It’s a dump deep in the woods, or so we are meant to think, but it’s not that far off the road, because Katie walks from there to town and back all the time. I’d comment about the state of the floor, but I’ve lived in Carolina in a house with a floor similarly unstable, so I’ll leave that alone. I will say, however, that if you step on the floor, it breaks, and you see a large rodent with a long tail underneath, do not leave it uncovered all night. Katie does. What? This is fanciful fiction at its most sappy–good thing–so the muskrat or whatever it is doesn’t come inside. (Remind me to tell you how Laura Szilasi and I once killed a gigantic rat in Varsity Village.)

Naturally, Alex, the owner of the store falls in love with her. Naturally his dead wife’s ghost appears to Katie all through the movie, even before we have met Alex. Naturally Alex lives adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean where his son plays on the pier every day, but has never learned to swim. Since they have nothing to do all day but mind a sparsely-shopped-in (unless the Greyhound is in town) store, you’d think they could have taken a little time out over the years to teach the kid to swim.

But back to the advice: if you are dating a man whose wife has died, definitely don’t ask what her name was, and definitely don’t ask to see a picture of her. That way you can be surprised when it turns out that the tall brown-haired woman who has befriended you turns out to be her ghost. Also, definitely don’t mention to anyone that you have a tall brown-haired friend named Jo who happens to live out in the woods with you. (When we first meet Jo, she comes on very personal and strong. I had been alerted that she was a ghost or I would have assumed she was a lonely Lesbian just out to make a new friend of the secretive and very cute new girl.)

When your new and twitterpated boyfriend sees your picture in the police station, he will be alarmed that you are wanted for murder. Don’t worry! Once you tell him that’s all a big mistake, he’ll drop the matter and leave his children with you. Don’t let it cross your mind that when you plunged a knife into your abusive husband’s back, he might actually have bled out. Also do not stop to wonder about the character of a man who will leave his children with someone who is wanted for murder.

When the knifed-husband who sends fake Wanted Posters around the country breaks into your neighbor’s home and listens to her answering machine, definitely run back up to Boston and kill her for (a) still using an answering machine, and (b) not erasing your old message. (That doesn’t happen, but a side trip to Boston would have made the movie a tad more exciting, if not more believable.)

By the way, we are alerted that Katie weighs 105 pounds. I don’t know about her (I have never weighed 105 pounds, except possibly for a brief instant on passing through 104 to 106), but most girls of this level of underweight are probably not able (with the lone exception of Demi Moore in her G.I. Jane days, if not today) to fight off police officers who are strangling them. Katie does it not once, but twice, and on the second time she manages to throw him into the ocean, but don’t worry, he recovers, if briefly.

I would have enjoyed the part about her reading The China Study and talking about veganism if the whole “we have free books that people leave” hadn’t been put into the script for the sole purpose of having her read The China Study and then comment about how gorillas eat kale. After talking about the glories of eating plants only, Katie kills a nonoffending fish for the joy of stabbing it, thereby softening the harsh self-righteousness of evangelizing vegans.

I might also (though this is less certain) have enjoyed the overly sentimental part about how Alex’s wife has a room over the store that no one is allowed to go in—it’s a shrine to Dead Mom–except that there’s a desk in the room in which are those now de rigueur letters that dying parents must write to their children, annual letters to be given them on this birthday and then that, plus letters to the daughter on her wedding day and to the son on his graduation day (as if the son won’t marry; as if the daughter won’t graduate; or worse, as if the son’s marriage doesn’t matter any more than the daughter’s graduation does, than which almost nothing is more sexist or cynical), all of which only exist so that at the end Alex can give Katie an envelope on which is written “To Her.” I’m definitely going to write a letter right now to the woman who is going to marry Brian after I die/run away/go loony.

Dear You,
Lottery win, you! He’s sweet, kind, and will do anything you ask and believe anything you say. He brings flowers at the appropriate moments. He will never call you fat. He snores and talks about global warming a little more than I’d like, but he makes $X,000 per year, and that should keep you in enough shopping (or movie attendance) to get over it. He doesn’t care if you cook or clean, but if you do, he’ll like that. Did I mention that he snores? Anyway, happiness to you. The kids are fine. Don’t worry about them. Make them pay their own way through college. Go to Hawaii as often as you can. Take earplugs, because at home you can just move to another room when the snoring gets to you, but in a hotel, you’re stuck.
Love,
Sharon

Back to the movie: what a stupid movie. At least, unlike other Nicholas Sparks movies, the main characters don’t die, although there are moments we’re sort of hoping. The abusive husband dies, but no one cares. The little girl almost dies in a fire. The son comes around, even though he previously hated Katie, which was amazing, because he didn’t even know she was a runaway married lady without identification fleeing the police.

Possibly worse than Nutcracker in 3D, (my previous standard for Worst Movie Ever) because that one could at least be blamed on an artiste funded by Europeans—so maybe I was missing some symbolism or profoundness of thought. There’s no excuse for this one.

It is possible this movie might be more believable, hence less stupid, had it been set in the 1930s, when young women might not have carried ID, would not have had social security numbers, would have assumed a police department so corrupt that a woman who showed up Boston General would be blamed for her own strangle marks, where someone might could get a job or rent a house without references, a last name, or a credit check.

The ghost-of-the-dead-wife thing we just have to let slide. There’s no excuse for it, and no reason for it other than to startle Katie at the end to find that the woman she’s been taking long walks in the woods with is actually the dead mother of her boyfriend’s children. It’s not like in Sixth Sense where there is some plot movement linked to the dead people. Nor is it like in A Beautiful Mind, where imaginary friends can be blamed on mental illness. I think Mr. Sparks was just wondering how far he could go and still have people make a movie of his nonsense, as if The Notebook wasn’t quite far enough.

There’s a sex scene (with sheeting).