"Nights in Rodanthe": More grown-up than your average old love story

Sure, it's nice to like the people who fall in love in a movie. But, as in the real world, not everyone ready for a new relationship is particularly cuddly.

In "Nights in Rodanthe," based on another highly adaptable romance novel by Nicholas Sparks ("The Notebook"), we witness a couple of middle-age characters slowly getting a life after denying themselves one for many years. The process isn't always pretty.

Paul (Richard Gere) is a doctor who books himself into an eye-catching inn on the coast of a North Carolina town called Rodanthe. (Truly on the coast: Ocean waves lap at the inn's foundation.) Paul's in the area to meet with the widower (Scott Glenn) of a woman who died during a surgical procedure. It's not an act of altruism: Paul's hoping to keep the angry, grieving man from suing him.

Paul seems basically decent, but he's brusque, curt and peevish with his hostess, Adrienne (Diane Lane), who is recently separated from a philandering husband (Christopher Meloni). Adrienne has been so wrapped up in motherhood, she's denied parts of herself for years. She's certainly sweet but tightly coiled.

Isolated at the inn in the midst of a violent storm, the doctor and mom inevitably connect as deeply as the lovers in "The Bridges of Madison County." But not, as in Clint Eastwood's film, as fleetingly: Paul and Adrienne know they're meant to be together and will be better people for it. They also know they will have to travel — separately and together — a long, uneasy path to stay together.

"Nights" is most interesting as the story of a challenging transition in the lives of adults, a crossing-over from the baggage of yesterday to the possibilities of tomorrow. Chick flick or not, it's actually dealing with something grown-ups can understand. How nice for a change.

The film's chief assets are its stars. Lane so fully inhabits Adrienne that her very skin seems saturated with the character's emotional exhaustion and, later, rejuvenation. Gere unhesitatingly throws himself into Paul's early and unattractive shortcomings. When Paul's blood starts warming up again, the result is genuinely moving.

Director George C. Wolfe, a stage director who has also made a handful of TV movies, can't quite get past a tendency to make "Nights" look like it's better suited to home viewing. And he's certainly not the kind of filmmaker (such as Douglas Sirk) who once could make so-called "women's pictures" an art form. But he does creatively treat Paul and Adrienne's initial connection with a kind of yadda-yadda dismissiveness that seems off-putting at first, but ends up underscoring, with some wit, the story's overall design.

The film's storm scene — banging shutters and all that — has an unexpected and metaphorically appropriate violence to it. James Franco's uncredited role as Paul's estranged son proves a rich addition to the film, especially toward the end.

Otherwise, "Nights" is cinematically unexciting but a welcome glimpse at the complications of life after age 40.

Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com