Rodanthe is a real place. Not so, the town of the same name in "Nights in Rodanthe," a place that bears only superficial resemblance to the small beach community on North Carolina's Outer Banks.

The first sign that this starry-eyed weeper based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks ("The Notebook") takes place in a parallel universe? Maybe the fact that a hurricane is able to pass through with little more advance notice than one character observing to another, "You may have heard something about bad weather." In this day and age of front-page weather news and minute-by-minute storm tracking? I don't think so.

The second sign? The romance between a guilt-wracked surgeon (Richard Gere) and a dumped wife (Diane Lane), who fall into each other's arms during the aforementioned storm, is utterly and completely unsupported by anything that happens in the film.

Oh, there's some hooey, of course, about how Lane's Adrienne (a kind of Mary Tyler Moore with gravitas) makes Gere's Paul "want to be a better person." That's an admirable goal, considering that, up until his magical transformation, he's not very nice.

Still, he is Richard Gere, at his most attractively crinkly and twinkly eyed here.

That doesn't go very far toward making such nonsense credible though. Neither, unfortunately, does first-time feature-film director George C. Wolfe's over-reliance on the kooky falling-in-love montage. What really sells this three-hanky tear-jerker -- and there were a lot of women buying it during a recent screening -- is Lane's steely and vulnerable performance. Like Tinker Bell, she almost made me believe in fairies. Almost.

-- Michael O'Sullivan (Sept. 26, 2008)

Contains crude language and scenes of pre- and post-coital cuddling.