Will long outlive the critics who scorned it

Rating: 8/10 (30 April 2009)

Now by all rights, this film should have been awful.
On paper the plot seems fairly trite, there are so many clichéd and terribly two-dimensional characters (eg Allie's father, Lon), some extremely predictable moments such as the confiscation and subsequent return of the letters by Allie's mother (on a side note - why do people always save these letters rather than just putting them in the trash?) and some very heavy handed attempts at creating suspense (gee... is Duke meant to be Noah or Lon? Like you didn't already know.)
Consequently, when the Notebook was released it was absolutely savaged by film critics for all of the above reasons. It was also condemned for trivialising Alzheimer's Disease, for being "poorly directed" (a common theme in many of the reviews) and for any number of other faults.
OK then, so if this film is just so awful, why does it have an 8.0 rating here on IMDb? Why does just about every female in the western world own it on DVD, (not to mention the many men - like myself - who have observed its uncanny ability to get girls "in the mood"?)
My answer: it is quite simply the perfect love story, told perfectly and (despite what the critics said) delivered at a perfect pace. It is intensely passionate yet quite unhurried, just like the best examples of another activity that I'll leave to your imagination.
It is timeless, and it gives substance to the dream that love can endure above all (a dream which - face it - we all buy into to some extent, even if we will never publicly admit it).
Like "The Shawshank Redemption", this is a film which has survived critical scorn and has earned its elevated stature in the public arena the hard way.
The simple fact is that people just keep buying it on DVD, people keep shedding tears to it, and critics everywhere are secretly retyping their original reviews (while fervently hoping no-one digs up what they wrote the first time).
And for the record, I'm a "man's man" who watches lots of sport and rides a motorcycle. But that scene where Allie realises that the story is actually all about her had me weeping as much as that time when I was 5 years old and Bambi's mother died.
This is a beautiful, heart-rending yet sublimely uplifting story, told with the utmost delicacy and gentle sweetness. The critics be damned.