A love story wrapped in a dementia gimmick

Rating: 5/10 (28 March 2005)

If you're a teenage girl who's just a sucker for a love story no matter how soppy, or anyone who checks his/her brain at the door of a theater showing one, read no further. You won't like this review.
I understand this is an adaptation of a novel. If it's true to the book, I'm not sure I want to read it. Maybe this is a trend in Hollywood movie marketing: A triple package, a movie that will 1) appeal to the all-important 18-35-year-old female viewer with a passionate love story; 2) also try to boost attendance among movie-going geezerdom and their aging Baby Boomer children by wrapping the love story in a dementia gimmick; and 3) cram an R movie into a PG-13 rating so teenagers can see it without their (ugh!) parents.
The main plot line is a fairly pedestrian, fairly predictable love story: Poor boy from Seabrook, NC (Ryan Gosling) meets spirited, strong-willed rich girl (Rachel McAdams) from the city, poor boy loses rich girl, poor boy makes good, formerly poor boy gets rich girl. There is nothing in particular to distinguish the story except the gimmick, which is that the story is told in flashback; it is read from a NOTEBOOK (get it?) written by Allie, the woman in the love story, but it is sixty years later; now she is played by Gena Rowlands and she has moderate to severe dementia, presumably Alzheimer's disease (there are many causes of dementia, but most lay people don't know that; to most of the clueless general public, dementia and Alzheimer's disease are synonymous, aren't they?). Her husband Noah (now played by James Garner), who so adores his wife that he lives in her nursing home although he doesn't need to, reads the notebook to her over a period of days. It is hinted that this is only the latest of many such readings, but she doesn't remember any of it, you see, so each reading is like the first; neither does she recognize any of her family more than occasionally. While this is, in fact, a worthy subject for a book or a film, the depiction of this woman's dementia is ludicrously bogus. The way she behaves isn't true to life, it's arranged to suit the plot. No one with dementia acts the way she does. I wonder if the novel treated the woman's dementia with this much absurd inaccuracy. (Judging by his screen credits, Nicholas Sparks's stock in trade is treacly love stories.) There are (at the very least) two other scenes that also suggest that the producer didn't bother to hire a technical adviser for the medical parts of this movie: Toward the end of the film, the James Garner character is wheeled out of the nursing home on a stretcher, obviously toward a waiting ambulance to take him to the hospital, and the doctor or paramedic is saying there is "no pulse and no blood pressure." And NO ONE is doing CPR or performing ACLS (advanced cardiac life support) on him. Anyone who watches "ER" knows that's a major goof. He is shown having been discharged from the hospital a few days later looking not particularly worse for his near-death experience. A few days later, in one of the movie's final scenes, the Gena Rowlands character becomes agitated and combative, which is the only scene that seems remotely realistic---until the "doctor" rushes in with his trusty all-purpose movie syringe ALREADY UNCAPPED, and without prepping the skin or anything, gives her "two cc's" of something. In a situation like that, a doctor or nurse would invariably give a certain number of "milligrams" of a drug. Furthermore, she was not nearly combative enough to be given anything before you would try restraint and reassurance. And then comes the climactic scene that blows the movie right out of the real world into some kind of alternative romance-novel universe: He comes to her room that night; she asks him, "Can memories take us away together?", he says yes and crawls into bed with her, and they both die that night. Not a dry eye in the house, right? Go look up "mawkish."
Garner and Rowlands are durable talents who turn in great performances every time, but don't really have much to do in this film; much more screen time is given to the young actors, whose work is serviceable, especially McAdams as a fiery redhead, but they aren't really called on to endow their characters with any particular depth. The director is Nick Cassavetes, Rowlands's real-life son. Anyone who has seen his father John's idiosyncratic masterpieces will recognize that either Nick is not the talent his father was or has not yet really come into his own as a director.