Adrienne (Diane Lane) with her best friend Jean (Rhode Island’s Viola Davis) in Nights in Rodanthe.

Warner Bros.

There were sniffles and moist eyes and even wipe-away tears at the end of a screening of the love story Nights in Rodanthe.

Based on the best-selling novel by Nicholas Sparks, an author who knows how to pull the emotional strings of women hankering for a good cry, Nights in Rodanthe seems to be the ultimate chick flick … at least if the chicks happen to be middle aged or beyond. Near the end of the film, Diane Lane gets to pull out all the stops in a long, teary scene that will almost certainly touch even the most hardened heart. It seemed that a good 90 percent of the women in the audience were affected by that moment as Lane’s Adrienne Willis confronted a loss that had shattered her future.

At the start of Nights in Rodanthe, Adrienne is trying to pull her life together after her husband, Jack (Christopher Meloni of Law and Order: SVU) has left her for another woman. But he returns, begging to get back into her life. Her young son and teenage daughter, who is 15 going on 30, want their family made whole again. Her daughter, who doesn’t have the complete story, resents her mother and thinks she’s a roadblock. But at this point, Adrienne is not so sure she wants to welcome Jack back.

To clear her head, she travels to Rodanthe, a small, narrow island off the North Carolina coast to oversee a bed and breakfast run by a longtime girlfriend who will be away on business. It’s the off season and there will be only one guest for four nights, Dr. Paul Flanner (Richard Gere). The rambling house sits on stilts at the very edge of the sea. One wonders whether it will be swallowed in the next hurricane. When the island’s folksy locals keep warning about a storm brewing, one can only think, “Uh-oh.”

Adrienne is looking for answers to her romantic problems. Paul is looking to make amends for the guilt he feels over a medical crisis that occurred during one of his surgeries and frets over his own family problems. His wife has left him. He has sold his house. His son, a saint who runs a clinic in some unnamed Latin American backwater, shuns him.

So here we have two damaged people looking for answers on an island where the big house hugging the sea seems to be the only building for miles and miles. (Gee, how do they get electricity, since no electric poles are visible?) Do you think these two might …?

The plot’s setup is transparent and how it all gets resolved is nothing short of manipulative in the script by Ann Peacock and John Romano. Sparks also wrote the equally tear-stained Message in a Bottle and The Notebook, both of which went on to become hit movies. Who knows? He might hit the jackpot with Nights in Rodanthe as well, even though director George C. Wolfe, who has done much of his work on the stage and for television, lets the story develop at a snail’s pace as we sit waiting for the inevitable.

Gere and Lane last worked together in 2002’s Unfaithful, in which she played the adulterous wife and he the jealous husband. So they have a good chemistry, leading us easily into the romantic situations of Nights in Rodanthe. Yet despite the slow pace Wolfe takes in setting up the romance, the actual event and the aftermath seem oddly rushed. Better get to those teary moments and those gushy romantic letters. Wolfe and Sparks know what their audience wants. Reach for your handkerchiefs. There’s a storm brewin.’

** 1/2Nights in Rodanthe

Starring: Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Scott Glenn, Christopher Meloni, Viola Davis.

Rated: PG-13, contains sexual situations, adult themes

mjanuson@projo.com