The Notebook (2004)

Movie / Show Details

Amazon.com

When you consider that old-fashioned tearjerkers are an endangered species in Hollywood, a movie like The Notebook can be embraced without apology. Yes, it’s syrupy sweet and clogged with clichés, and one can only marvel at the irony of Nick Cassavetes directing a weeper that his late father John–whose own films were devoid of saccharine sentiment–would have sneered at. Still, this touchingly impassioned and great-looking adaptation of the popular Nicholas Sparks novel has much to recommend, including appealing young costars (Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams) and appealing old costars (James Garner and Gena Rowlands, the director’s mother) playing the same loving couple in (respectively) early 1940s and present-day North Carolina. He was poor, she was rich, and you can guess the rest; decades later, he’s unabashedly devoted, and she’s drifting into the memory-loss of senile dementia. How their love endured is the story preserved in the titular notebook that he reads to her in their twilight years. The movie’s open to ridicule, but as a delicate tearjerker it works just fine. Message in a Bottle and A Walk to Remember were also based on Sparks novels, suggesting a triple-feature that hopeless romantics will cherish. –Jeff Shannon

Product Description

Notebook, The (DVD) (WS)
In Seabrook, North Carolina in the 1940s, teenaged debutante Allie Hamilton (Rachel McAdams) and local boy Noah Calhoun (Ryan Gosling) spend one passionate, carefree summer together and deeply in love. But when the summer ends, war and duty separate the young couple. Today, an elderly man (James Garner) visits a nursing home to read from his notebook to a woman (Gena Rowlands) whose memory is fading. As he spins a tale of two young lovers with their whole lives before them, his beloved Allie relives a long-ago passion that has never died, an unbreakable bond between two ordinary people rendered extraordinary by the strength, power and beauty of true love. ]]>

Review

A lovely surprise. Ripe with feeling and lush with physical beauty, it’s a love story that swings confidently between age and youth… –Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern