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When you consider that old-fashioned tearjerkers are an endangered species in Hollywood, a movie like
The Notebook can be embraced without apology. Yes, it's syrupy sweet and clogged with clichés, and one can only marvel at the irony of Nick Cassavetes directing a weeper that his late father John--whose own films were devoid of saccharine sentiment--would have sneered at. Still, this touchingly impassioned and great-looking adaptation of the popular Nicholas Sparks
novel has much to recommend, including appealing young costars (Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams) and appealing old costars (James Garner and Gena Rowlands, the director's mother) playing the same loving couple in (respectively) early 1940s and present-day North Carolina. He was poor, she was rich, and you can guess the rest; decades later, he's unabashedly devoted, and she's drifting into the memory-loss of senile dementia. How their love endured is the story preserved in the titular notebook that he reads to her in their twilight years. The movie's open to ridicule, but as a delicate tearjerker it works just fine.
Message in a Bottle and
A Walk to Remember were also based on Sparks novels, suggesting a triple-feature that hopeless romantics will cherish.
--Jeff Shannon
From The New Yorker
Another story from the sap-filled pen of Nicholas Sparks ("Message in a Bottle," "A Walk to Remember") is given the familiar golden-hued treatment by the director Nick Cassavetes and the screenwriter Jeremy Leven. This love story, told through flashbacks to the nineteen-forties, concerns a woman (Gena Rowlands) who is suffering from Alzheimer's and the attempt by her old flame (James Garner) to rekindle a memory of their romantic past. Their younger selves are played by Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, and their idealized love story is filled with clichés. Cassavetes unapologetically lifts romantic set pieces from earlier films like "On Golden Pond" and "East of Eden" in an attempt to rustle up some first-love tension, but the film is as bland and sentimental as a greeting card. -Bruce Diones
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker