A film with the potential to be a real heartbreaker let down by sentiment and melodrama

Rating: 7/10 (22 September 2008)

Channel 4 here in the UK heavily promoted UK "The Notebook" over the weekend, and I was attracted by the trailer into watching it last night. The cinematography was excellent, especially the scenes of the geese on the river. The movie wonderfully captured a sense of place: I smiled at the scenes of the riverbanks and Spanish moss, and I could feel the warmth of the summer nights. I've never spent much time in South Carolina, but I spent several years living in North Central Florida, and the film does justice to the beauty of the Southern wilderness.
However, the script lets down the love story. "The Notebook" has the potential to be a shattering film about the power of love. The flashbacks to Ally and Noah's youth, aside from the cinematography, are nothing special. They tell a story told many times before in other films and books: rich girl meets poor boy, boy loses girl, boy meets girl again, girl must choose on the eve of her wedding whether to marry for security and love or just love. It's the framing story that delivers a punch: what happens when a couple who have overcome great obstacles to be together face a terrible obstacle that can not be defeated, that destroys them not just by attacking their bodies, as old age does, but by obliterating one partner's memory and mind? The film reveals how Duke dedicates himself to his wife, living in the same residential home, reading to her from the notebook she compiled, sparking whatever residential memories remain of their life together. The contemporary scenes show the pain of their children, who Ally greets as strangers, and the torture of Duke as he continually tries to help his wife emerge from her perpetual cloud of forgetting, even for a few moments.
If the film ended with Duke's witnessing Ally's confusion and terror as she struggles against him, believing him once again to be a stranger, it would be heartbreaking. Unfortunately "The Notebook" is diminished by melodrama and sentimentality. I'm not a medical expert but I have seen documentaries about Alzheimer's and I've read several books by Oliver Sacks: they state, as the doctor in "the Notebook" does, that once brain cells die, once memory begins to deteriorate, there's not much hope of it ever returning. Duke battles against the disease, as did Ally herself when she wrote the stories of their lives that he reads to her. I cried when he read his beloved Whitman to her: "Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost". Whitman's lines are a tribute to Ally and Duke's lonely struggle:
No birth, identity, form--no object of the world. Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing; Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers left from earlier fires, The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again
But the film's portrayal of dementia is more like the Keeper in Babylon 5: a force that suppresses a person's mind, that can be subdued for a few moments so that the personality can emerge intact and free for a precious short time. Indeed Ally asks how much time they have and Duke replies that the last time it was for 5 minutes.
"The notebook" would be much more powerful if it showed a flicker of recognition on Ally's face, a scene that shows she understands what Duke means to her: not an inner teenager peeping out of a aged body to yell yoo hoo before curfew kicks back in. It would also be much powerful if it resisted the maudlin ending. I could believe that Ally would remember Duke reading to her, that she would miss him, that even she was again her old self for a few moments. But their dying hand in hand and the CGI geese were slush.
There's a heartbreaking story within "The Notebook" but the laspses into sentiment and melodrama make it another four handkerchief weepie, perfect for a Sunday afternoon matinée. A pity, because the real love story is glossed over: Duke and Ally's struggle to preserve their love in the face of oblivion.