Milk of amnesia

Rating: 3/10 (13 December 2004)

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT. 'The Notebook' is the 17,329,587th movie about a woman choosing between a reliable steady guy who sincerely loves her and a macho jerk. It's also the 17,329,587th movie in which (big surprise!) she chooses the macho jerk, and we're supposed to applaud that decision. This movie's one slight twist in the moss-encrusted formula is a flashback framing device, which supposedly makes it more difficult for us in the present to guess which choice she made in the 1950s.
Gena Rowlands (who pronounces it 'jenna') plays a woman with Alzheimer's Movie disease, which is different from real-life Alzheimer's disease because it only makes her forget things in the service of the plot line. Real-life Alzheimer's patients, tragically, forget their toilet-training and stuff like that. Gena Rowlands is all glammed-up here, remembering everything except minor details like which man she married. When the script calls for her to have a convenient resurgence of memory, here it comes bang on schedule. When the script calls for an equally convenient loss of the same memory, there it goes.
Due to the flashback structure, the major roles are split between young actors (playing the leads in the 1940s and '50s) and senior-citizen actors as the same characters in the present. Gena Rowlands shares her role with the much younger Rachel McAdams as Allie Hamilton. Unfortunately, Ms McAdams has two very prominent birthmarks which have no counterparts on Ms Rowlands ... making Allie Hamilton the world's only woman whose body has FEWER spots as she gets older.
There is anachronistic dialogue in the flashback scenes. The 1940s sequences are production-designed within an inch of their lives, but they don't look like the actual 1940s. Everything is too bright, too colourful, with no sense of wartime shortages or rationing. As usual in Hollywood movies, we get the past as Hollywood *wants* it to be, not the past as it actually was. I cringed during one scene in an upscale nightclub in the southern United States in the 1940s, in which an African-American bandleader grins his approval while black and white couples share the dance floor. There may have been a few lower-class roadhouses in the Jim Crow south where the races mingled, but it did *not* happen in upper-class establishments like the one shown here!
Noah Calhoun, the macho jerk, not only places himself in danger but also endangers everybody else (first on a ferris wheel, then by grabbing the brake of a bus while it's in motion), and we're meant to admire this guy. Later, in the 1950s, he sports an incredibly ridiculous sensitive-guy beard that's right out of the 1980s or later. Any white man who wore a beard like this in the southern United States in the 1950s would have been carried out of town on a rail.
Sam Shepard does his usual posturing and preening. James Garner plays the older version of one of the two rivals for Allie's affection, and we're not supposed to know whether she chose irresponsible jerk Noah or steady reliable Lon. Sorry, but movie heroines always make that choice the same way, so the suspense level is zero.
I will give director Nick Cassavetes some credit: he's actually interested in telling a story about human interaction, unlike his father John Cassavetes who specialised in pretentious acting-school exercises in which nothing ever happened. Unfortunately, the story in 'The Notebook' is a very predictable one. This movie is soppy, sloppy, floppy and choppy. I'll rate it 3 points out of 10.