A sentimental and predictable movie with a few genuinely touching moments

Rating: Null/10 (6 August 2005)

After being told time and time again by my female friends to "watch The Notebook, you'll cry soooo much!" I finally did it, alone, in the privacy of my own home, so that if it was too terrible I could deny ever having seen it later.
It was almost exactly what I expected it to be. Boy from lower class meets girl from upper class, separated by parents, reunited by chance years later, girl has to decide between the man she loved at 17 and her fiancée, who represents the world she "belongs" in. Sound familiar? It should, it's a plot that's been worn thin through overuse, and a charming performance by Rachel McAdams is not enough to give it new life. Nicholas Sparks, known mostly for for his even greater offender on the sentimental scene, A Walk to Remember, seems more interested in constructing a tale that entertains due to its predictability and tried-and-true appeal, not its originality or the freshness of dialogue, setting, or character. Despite showing a few impressive chops, Ryan Gosling fails to break out of the stock underdog role, and achieves his distinctive moments only during the moments where he's pitted against McAdams in their frequent fights, not during the love scenes themselves.
The real charm of this movie, for me, was the structure that the story is set against. An old man reads the story of the two young lovers to an old woman suffering for the last stages of Alzheimer's, a routine that we are given to understand happens every day. This elderly act of love is a thousand times sweeter and more convincing than any part of the story he retells--though Sparks can't resist tossing in further cheap sentiment by constant references to an expected "miracle" that will cure his companion's disease.
Technically, the movie is impressive. The sets and directing are generally above par, but cannot save the movie from being a typical chick-flick tear jerker. It has redeeming qualities, certainly, but after watching it I felt the hype it's received as "a perfect and enduring love story" was not fully deserved. In a few years, it will still have its fans, but it will be regaled to two copies in Blockbuster's that get rented perhaps once a month, replaced by similar movies that are again declared "beautiful and heartwarming". The acclaim it's earned popularly is, in my opinion, only earned because the lovers of this film loved the story before they even entered the theatre, and were thrilled to get exactly what they expected.