First Love, Last Love, and Lasting Love

Rating: 9/10 (24 October 2005)

The Notebook is a story in a story format that opens with Duke (James Garner) and his friend, (Gena Rowland) who are residents in a nursing home. Duke reads to the woman who demonstrates advanced senile dementia and his story serves to recollect and intrigue from her fuzzy memory. The story he reads of Noah (Ryan Gosling) and Allie (Rachael McAdams) is set in the pre-WWII rural south where he is a blue collar mill worker earning 41 cents an hour, and she is the lively daughter of wealthy parents who want her to make a good match. Noah and his father (Sam Shepard) are wealthy in other ways with their love of poetry which is integral to their relationship, while Allie is defined by the pressures for young women of patrician upbringing of the era.
Gosling and McAdams as the young lovers are vibrant, endearing, and explosive on screen as first love blossoms to overtake the plans of Allie's parents for her education at Sarah Lawrence College. While Noah's father supports his choice, Allie's parents are not delighted with their daughter. It is a familiar story of poor boy loves rich girl, pampered girl wants to please her family, and her family wants the best for their child and will go to whatever gets the daughter married to the rich nice guy (James Marsden). Noah and Allie fight, love, and are fated to be separated by the classism of her parents, the war, and her willingness to go along with the expectations of southern society, or so the audience is lead to believe. Noah rebuilds his dream house, rows on the lake, and pines.
Young lovers are contrasted by the devotion of Duke to the woman, and their relationship is the downside of the story as bodies and memories failing, the senior couple have their own problems -- his health and her inability to remember. Visited by grown children and grandchildren, Duke is revealed as Noah, and the woman is Allie. Although loving and supportive of their parents, the children want their father to leave the nursing facility and return to them because they recognize the hopelessness of their mother's inability to recollect her husband, her children and grandchildren, and their long marriage. But, Noah is committed to his sweetheart and stays by her side hoping for a miracle that will bring her memory back. So, he reads to her their story each day and waits for brief moments of lucidity to manifest.
The film is a wonderful example of exquisite cinematography, storytelling, superior casting, and picturesque location that unites in a rare film of charm and sentiment without deteriorating into maudlin emotionalism. With disposable marriages the norm for contemporary society, The Notebook presents the fading notion of loyalty, devotion, and commitment for a lifetime. It is a gentle film with old fashion values and as characterized by Gosling and McAdams, Noah and Allie experience the joys and heartbreak that long lived romantic love creates till death do part.