Miley Cyrus is a phenomenon and a superstar and a notable icon of North American Have It Your Way-ism, but she is not an especially talented thespian. As star of “The Last Song”, a melodrama written by Nicholas Sparks, the scribe behind “The Notebook” and “A Walk to Remember,” she does okay with surly teenaged charm and even with the weepy scenes, but scenes of dramatic confession and confrontation have an uncomfortable deadness.

It’s not Cyrus’s fault, of course, that Sparks’s dialogue is so lifeless, so full of icky nonsense platitudes. The writing is so unrepentantly tossed-off that whenever characters reveal an intense emotional event from their past, they seem to speak in outline form. A kid makes a dramatic confession about accidentally starting a fire, “Well, we were behind the church, just playin’ around, and, and drinkin’, and then we started…” Pause.
Authority figure, “Playing with fire?”

“…Yeah.” The end. The mechanical story structure calls on Cyrus’ protagonist to periodically yell at and push away her heroic, chiseled boyfriend for contrived reasons so that he can come back and kiss her on the beach in different light settings. (This boyfriend also happens to be very wealthy and to think that Miley Cyrus has an exceptional singing voice.) The whole thing is despicably squeaky-clean and simplistic—a vile, plastic product.

Needless to say, it disturbs me that I kind of liked this stupid movie. The reason is that it is, in the end, about death. While the movie is clumsy with many small things, it is surprisingly graceful when it comes to this large thing. Greg Kinnear, as Cyrus’s sincere and lonely father, does well, though he’s saddled with as much treacly dialogue as everyone else is and does some cutesy mugging as he tries to win Cyrus’ surly teenaged affection.

He happens to have cancer, which is a dangerous device, but the movie doesn’t push it; it simply lets us know that this well-meaning older man is dying, and suddenly his sappy advice and corny sense of humor seem quite valuable, like a real person’s. Cyrus and her boyfriend are watching some baby sea turtles scampering out from their eggs when Kinnear collapses—and we get a creepy shot of the baby turtles being engulfed by the ocean. Just before the section of the film that isolates Cyrus and Kinnear in the father’s last days, Cyrus throws one last self-righteous, angry speech at her boyfriend, but then, he tries several times to kiss her while she jerks back, as if infected and afraid. Up to that point, the film has been an intermittently pleasant but awfully gooey ode to teenage romance—but an awareness of death makes the picture-postcard atmosphere more tolerable, even comforting.
It remains a picture-postcard affair, mortality and all, and a pretty bland one, artistically speaking. It does, however, have one lovely and meaningful image. The movie begins with a few moments of footage of a church burning down—and, of course, it has been rebuilt by the end, with a big stained-glass window designed by Kinnear’s character. I have to admit that it is, in my opinion, a lovely stained-glass window; it shows two women huddled in awe in one corner and a big, spiky angel rising brightly in the middle.

This is the kind of movie where they talk about hope and love a lot while you most likely roll your eyes; I only wish all of the movie were as concrete and resurrectional as that window. Like most everything else, the window gets co-opted for nauseating, maudlin effect—as when Cyrus, at the funeral service, sees a sparkle of sunlight in it and says with mournful whimsy, “Hi, Dad.” But it really is a lovely window.