mawkish romance

Rating: 5/10 (12 September 2005)

"The Notebook" is a trite, hackneyed tale of a poor little rich girl who falls in love with a boy from the wrong side of the tracks. It's South Carolina in the 1940's, and Allie Hamilton is a highly educated, ambitious young lady living under the watchful eyes of her snooty, upper crust parents who have pretty much mapped out her whole life for her. Enter Noah Calhoun, a poor working class boy with a devil-may-care spirit and a zest for living whom Allie falls instantly in love with while she and her parents are staying in town one summer. One look at their daughter's pawing this strapping young man from the lower social orders and the parents are hightailing it back to Charleston with the wayward Allie in tow, bringing an end to a flaming summer romance that somehow manages to live on through a subsequent world war (involving the least emotional war buddy death scene in movie history), Allie's engagement to a wealthy veteran, her eventual Alzheimer's, and Noah's disturbingly scraggly beard (he's too depressed to shave, you see).
Even though Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling are appealing as the two young lovers, very little about "The Notebook" feels either original or genuine. It seems, in fact, to have been cobbled together from other, considerably more impressive tales of unrequited love in which wealth and class play a key role in keeping the lovers apart. The sad truth is that most of what happens to the pair smacks of dime-novel sentimentality and phoniness. For instance, after a night of powerhouse lovemaking between the newly reunited lovers, Allie wakes up to find herself alone with only a note from Noah telling her to follow the arrows to a surprise. And, lo and behold, what do we see but a long line of arrows lying on the floor leading from the bedroom to a sitting room down the hall. Now, is it really conceivable that Noah sat up all night with a scissors cutting out perfectly formed paper arrows, or is this just one of those scenes that could happen only in the movies? And why does Allie's mother keep all those letters from Noah - 365 of them in one year! - that she carefully hid from her daughter, only to turn them over to Allie years later all tightly wrapped up in a neat little bundle? And I won't even go into the final scene of the movie, which is the worst case of expediency over credibility that I've seen in a movie in a long long time.
Based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks, the film, written by Jan Sardi and Jeremy Levin, and directed by Nick Cassavetes, has been structured as one giant flashback, in which a now aged Noah (James Garner) is reciting the tale to Allie (Gena Rowlands), who is suffering from what the doctor calls "senile dementia" and so doesn't realize that the story is about them. This approach brings a certain added poignancy to the film - or at least it would were it not undercut by the sappiness of Garner's voice-over narration and that far too heavy-handed conclusion. Joan Allen gives her usual dependable performance as Allie's mother, although her character's 180 degree turnabout at the end seems more a matter of convenience than a carefully though-out metamorphosis within her character. At least the movie doesn't turn Allie's fiancé into an unreasonable and hateful villain. The writers do, at least, deserve some credit for that.
In a final note, the film isn't even careful with its period details. For instance, there's a shot (supposedly during war time or immediately thereafter) of characters leaving a movie theater with "On the Town" splashed across the marquee. The problem is that the film wasn't even released until 1949!