Life's a mixed bag for Diane Lane's Adrienne. Her happy, healthy family  - a pre-teen son and a mildly volatile teenage daughter - has been divided since she booted her husband from the family home having discovered his extra-marital affair.

Her home, albeit spacious and well decorated, is apparently hard work (she doesn't appear to have a 9-5) and, particularly after hubby attempts to make up and move home, she feels a holiday is in order.

So she packs the kids off to stay with their errant father, and heads to the beachside town of Rodanthe, where she takes care of an off-season holiday house while her best friend (the holiday home's owner) takes some - probably much more deserved - quality time.

With the hurricanes about to hit, the house would normally be boarded up at this time of year. But Adrienne has a solitary guest coming to stay, and he's not in a good mood.

Gere's Paul is in town to see to a personal obligation. He's a doctor, and when something went awry during one of his shifts, it led to the death of a patient and a rift with his son (James Franco).

Initially frosty, Paul and Adrienne struggle to converse as he ponders the prospect of visiting his patient's surviving family members, while Adrienne attempts to deal with her husband's proposed reconciliation.

Despite the tension, the pair soon warm to each other, and through the power of love, begin to fix the problems that brought them to this crossroads.

Director George C. Wolfe's directorial debut is efficiently shot - the beach house is most certainly an intriguing backdrop to the love story - although quite why he seems to have hired the Crash Test Dummies to score the thing is not clear.

Gere is his usual self - occasional bouts of overacting mixed with a smugness that would be irritating if he didn't do it so well. Lane again proves that she's simply not in enough movies, somehow managing to instil emotion into a merely serviceable script.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to sympathise with a rich doctor who zips around town in a sports car and a beautiful woman whose husband clearly loves her, and whose kids are doing just fine.

Despite cast protestations to the contrary, the story is primarily designed to tug at female heart-strings.

Franco and Scott Glenn make fleeting appearances as representations of Paul's fractured relationships, and perhaps if the focus had been allowed to feature on their characters the film would have developed further purpose.

But the focus was always the love story. In that respect it ticks all the right boxes to be a tear-jerking hit.

Rich Phippen