This film is based on a novel from Nicholas Sparks, telling the love stories of two couples separated by more than half a century.

    The first scene in the film is a flashback* — to the moment when a bull rider, Luke Collins (Scott Eastwood), took a very short ride on a bull that almost killed him. A year later, Collins decides to make a comeback. Then he meets and falls in love with Sophia Danko (Britt Robertson), an art-history student about to graduate from North Carolina’s Wake Forest University and move to New York City to take an internship* at a famous gallery.

    Just after Collins and Danko conclude that a long-term relationship between them will never work, and he’s driving her back to the sorority* house in his red pickup, when he sees a broken guard rail and they discover a crashed car with a barely* conscious* old man at the wheel.

    Somehow the old man says “box…box” as the two young people pull him to safety, and Danko goes back to get the box from the front seat. How surprised she is to find the treasured box is full of old letters, which she begins to read while waiting in the hospital for news on the old man’s condition.

    The old man is Ira Levinson (Alan Alda), and his younger self (played by Jack Huston) wrote those letters to his longtime wife, Ruth (Oona Chaplin), even though she was seldom farther away than the next room. Ira and Ruth are both Jewish, but he’s a North Carolina native while she is a pre-World War II refugee* from Austria. Shortly before he’s sent to war, these young lovers vow* to marry and have many, many children. But a war wound leaves him sterile* and this finally creates a seemingly unbridgeable* gap between them — which is only overcome when Ruth discovers an outlet to express herself.

    The film is lovely to look at, and there’s just enough rodeo* action to inject some excitement into these predictable* stories. But, truly, it’s this very predictability that keeps Sparks’ books and movies popular. His stories can always make us shed* a tear or two over the impossible dream of living in one of his fairy tales.(SD-Agencies)