Miley Cyrus, of Hannah Montana fame, currently stars in a new movie titled The Last Song. It’s definitely worth your time and money.
Here’s the gist of Song: Veronica, aka Ronnie, is a piano prodigy who has just graduated from high school and has been accepted at Julliard. Unfortunately, Ronnie’s parents, Steve and Kim, have recently divorced, and Ronnie blames her father for everything. The parents decide that Ronnie and her brother Jonah should spend the summer with their father at his beach house in Georgia. Jonah loves being with his father, but Ronnie is 180 degrees away. At first she acts like a totally spoiled brat who can barely utter a civil word to her father. She hasn’t played the piano since the divorce and insists she is not going to attend Julliard. All she seemingly wants to do is hang around the beach with her new friends, especially a young man named Will, with whom she begins a romance.
So far, so predictable. At this point, however, the movie starts to get substantive. Ronnie meets Will’s stuffy, wealthy parents and learns there’s a lot more depth to Will than it first appeared. Steve spends a lot of time with young Jonah in reassembling a broken stained glass window from Steve’s church. It turns out that Steve is wrongly believed to have started a fire which partly destroyed the church. Steve shows great patience in listening to Ronnie and accepting her statement that she did not shoplift in a local store. (She didn’t.) One night Ronnie and her boyfriend want to spend the night in beach chairs guarding sea turtle eggs from hungry raccoons. At the proper time Steve appears, moves the chairs away from each other, and draws a heavy line in the sand. He says to Will, “Don’t cross the line.” “I understand, sir,” Will replies. Ronnie begins to soften and mellow, and father and daughter take steps toward restoring their relationship. But then we learn that all is not well with Steve. I won’t say anything more about the storyline except that, as one might expect, Ronnie does start playing the piano again.
The Last Song celebrates family relationships and the importance of active listening. It’s about forgiveness and the need for fathers to be present in their children’s lives. It explores the phenomenon of divorce and, while certainly not approving it, takes the viewpoint that one should try to make the best of a difficult situation. Steve, Ronnie, and Will all make courageous moral decisions.
The picture is well put together. Miley Cyrus does a good job of acting, and Greg Kinnear, as Steve, does an excellent one. There are a few crudities of language, though no misuses of the Lord’s name that I heard. All in all it’s a movie one can take the family to and leave with a feeling of satisfaction. Better take your handkerchief.
Film Rating: PG
My Rating: 3 stars
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