Love Overcomes War in 'Dear John'

Despite the intrusion of post-9/11 themes into the subdued suburban settings of previous Nicholas Sparks film adaptations such as “The Notebook,” “Message in a Bottle,” and “A Walk to Remember,” actors Channing M. Tatum and Amanda M. Seyfried said in a conference call that their upcoming film “Dear John” is still in line with the emotionally moving material at which Sparks excels.

“I really don’t want people thinking that they’re going to go in and have another depressing war movie on their hands,” says Tatum, the star of “Step-Up” and “GI Joe.”

“We tried to take as much of the military out. We didn’t want to see John with a weapon on all the time and slogging through really dangerous places... We really just wanted it to be about two kids falling in love.”

Tatum plays John—a Special Forces member who falls in love with college student Savannah (Seyfried) while on military leave in South Carolina. The two exchange letters when John is deployed to Afghanistan.

After months of continued war-time correspondence, Savannah sends a break-up and farewell letter to John—thus lending the movie its title—and forces him to cope with their broken relationship when he returns to his home.

Though the two actors spoke to military personnel and their families to research their roles, Tatum and Seyfried were careful to separate their admiration for the sacrifices made by members of the armed forces from their own portrayals in the movie. Seyfried, whose credits include the HBO series “Big Love” and the movie musical “Mamma Mia!” says, “I recently just met a bunch of women that are literally just hanging and waiting... about 100 families [at Fort Bragg, NC], wives in particular, that were telling me how their husband or fiancé had just been deployed and it’s tough.”

“I really can’t say I understand [their sacrifice] because I don’t think I ever could. I’m not that brave to go without that connection for that long, but they trust that these are the people that they are meant to be with, so they’ll do anything,” says Seyfried.

While the storyline focusing on the difficulty of maintaining relationships in a time of war may mirror the lives of members of the Armed Forces today, Tatum and Seyfried predict a much larger audience could also relate to the central themes of “Dear John.” Tatum says, “I think we could have taken John out of the military and made him anything else as long as that distance and time was between them and things come down the road that they don’t expect... This is a story [about] two kids in love for the very first time and it’s that first love that you can’t get right.”

Because the war only serves as a backdrop, a plot device which separates the young couple and accelerates the emotional roller coaster of their relationship, the co-stars assert that this narrative of love and loss directly relates to college students.

Though this tale of young pretty people falling in and out of love may be somewhat conventional, Seyfried and Tatum contend that “Dear John” helps to fill a generic deficiency. “When ‘The Notebook’ came out, people were running to see that movie because I think there’s a real lack of movies like that,” says Tatum.

And though “Dear John” is poised to revive a market which hasn’t been well-saturated in recent years, its timely themes can appeal to a broader viewership as well.

—Staff Writer Kristie T. La can be reached at kla@college.harvard.edu.