A Walk to Remember

Jan. 25, 2002

Despite being a proudly cynical 16-year-old, I sobbed my way through most of Nicholas Sparks’s 1999 novel, A Walk to Remember. Sparks, a notable asshole, somehow managed to pen the ultimate fantasy of any God Girl (including Muslim God Girls). It goes like this: Bookish, plain, religious girl manages to pull the Hottest Guy in School by being smart, kind, and wholesome. Deep down I wanted nothing more than to marry the handsome, tall, athletic boy without putting on any makeup, then die of cancer before actually consummating the marriage, thus remaining pure and perfect in his mind.

So when the movie, starring Mandy Moore with a bad, mousy hairstyle, came out, I was livid about the casting of a gorgeous girl who crooned about missing boys like candy as this story’s heroine. If you’ve never seen it (congratulations), it’s like the sad, pure version of She’s All That. Shane West plays Landon, a popular high school jock who, as a punishment for nearly killing a friend, is stuck doing the school play. Moore plays his costar, Jamie, a very religious and studious girl who lives a totally different life, as indicated by her overalls. I watched it with my friends who loved romantic comedies but hated my running commentary. I did not shed a single tear, but I did repeatedly yell, “Shane West, take off your shirt,” because I was committed to my whole bit as a surly teenage girl. There was also a palpable lack of chemistry between West and Moore, which made it even more painful to watch.

A Walk to Remember contains a lot of perfectly cringe spots, but my favorite is Moore’s glasses-off moment: On the opening night of the school play, everyone realizes the preacher’s daughter is actually hot when she takes the stage in a shimmering blue gown and sings beautifully.

Even though stories about teens finding unlikely romance were plentiful by 2002, this one stands out because it was saccharine and sad all the way through. It also softened the trope of the uptight goody-goody (think Rachel Leigh Cook in the 1998 movie All I Wanna Do). Here, the religious good girl was just that: a religious good girl who was a bit boring but not necessarily any more judgmental than her peers.

A Walk to Remember laid the groundwork for another beloved Nicholas Sparks sobfest, 2004’s The Notebook (which is also corny and terrible but at least there’s a lot of chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams). It feels a little hard to imagine such a heavy teen movie being made today — but if Hollywood remakes this, as Moore herself hopes, I hope it comes in the form of a horror movie starring Addison Rae. —Sara Yasin