Safe Haven = Hope

After reading the book, I knew that I had to watch the movie to see if the emotions described by Nicholas Sparks would come through with the same fierceness on screen.  I was pleasantly surprised.  Safe Haven is about a young woman who is running from her life in Boston and ends up in a small, seaside town in North Carolina.  All she wants to do is lay low and hope no one notices her.  She rents a small cottage in the woods/grass area which is isolated from most of town.  That doesn't last long. The general store owner and his 2 kids notice her and can’t stop thinking about her. She also befriends a neighbor.  Her plan of just blending in doesn't work out very well.  In a side story, the life she was leaving behind in Boston is slowly catching up to her.

Julianne Hough was a perfect fit for this role.  She portrayed the battered yet hopeful young woman well having to switch between the two regularly throughout the film.  You believe her when she looks like she needs rescuing and when she just needs to stand on her own two feet.  Josh Duhamel on the other hand looks completely out of place.  He looks like is uncomfortable in every scene, doesn't know what to do and gets flustered whenever the camera is on him.  I can’t think of another actor who could be in the role but Duhamel doesn't fit.  It looks like the crew was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.  I understand they wanted someone with muscle and height but there had to have been another actor that would have given a much smoother and laid back performance. 

The use of the sound in the movie was something that caught my attention right from the opening credits.  Whenever she was alone with her own thoughts the music stopped and all you could hear was the noises around her – the birds in the trees, the wind in the grass, the sound of the patrons at the restaurant.  There was no background music. That only came when someone was with her – Duhamel, her friend or her ex.  It was almost subdued and lighthearted as was the rest of the movie.  Even during the end fight and fire it wasn’t explosive or over the top; it was mellow, calm and serene especially when the camera focused on her.  She made the environment and world around her calmer and more delicate no matter what else was happening.  That is exactly how things felt in the book when I was reading. 

Finally the book was told from her perspective and the movie followed suit. Rarely did we see a scene without her in it (no monologue for Duhamel or anyone else in the town) except when it flashed back to her ex trying to find her and slowly crawling into a nightmare of his own making that he was never going to get out of. 

At the end of the movie I felt hope.  I felt happiness. But hope was the main feeling - hope that no matter what there is always a safe place for someone to go if they are willing to look for it.