The Notebook (2004) Review
6/10
Official trailer
A man in a nursing home reads a story from a notebook to a woman who listens as though it were fiction. The story is about a summer in 1940 between a mill worker and a girl whose family have money.
The 6 is a split verdict. James Garner and Gena Rowlands are doing something very fine and very quiet in the present, and the film keeps leaving them for a period romance that runs on obstacles instead of on character. What tips it above average is that the frame isn’t decoration. The whole film is a man performing an act of maintenance on somebody who can’t remember him, and the period material is what he’s using to do it.
My feelings about The Notebook split right down the middle. Garner and Rowlands wreck me.
The summer romance mostly bores me, pretty people in pretty light jumping over hurdles somebody else put in their way. I kept wanting the film to stay in the nursing home, and every cut back to 1940 felt like a commercial break.
The Frame Is the Film
Gena Rowlands plays Allie in the present, and the direction was by her son Nick Cassavetes. It’s a fact that sits underneath every scene between her and Garner. What Rowlands does is play a woman who’s entirely present and entirely unmoored. She’s polite, curious, engaged with the story, and has no idea that the man telling it’s her husband. There’s no fog and no vacancy in the performance. That’s what makes it accurate and hard to watch. Garner is doing the harder half. Duke reads to her every day knowing what the outcome will be, and the whole performance is a man managing his own hope in front of somebody who can’t see it. The five minutes where she remembers, and then loses it again inside the same scene, is the best material in the film by a wide margin. She goes from recognition to panic to not knowing him, and Garner has to absorb all three without moving. That scene is the reason the rating isn’t lower. I can’t think of better screen listening than what Garner does there, sitting still while his wife finds him and loses him again inside five minutes, and letting all of it show on his face without a word.
The film is also unusually accurate about the mechanics. The staff manage him instead of her. His children want him to come home and can’t understand why he stays. A doctor explains, gently and more than once, that what he’s attempting doesn’t work and that he should stop. Every institution in the film is telling him to be reasonable and he declines.
A frame narrative justifies itself when the act of telling is itself the story. Duke isn’t introducing a flashback, he’s performing a daily treatment, and the stakes belong to the frame instead of to the past.
Which means the frame has to have its own arc. Here it does: the reading works, briefly, and then stops working, and the film’s real question is what he does after that. If your frame could be removed without changing the meaning of the inner story, it’s a delivery mechanism and should probably go.
The Romance Is Conventional
The 1940 material is a class melodrama assembled from familiar parts. Poor boy, rich girl, disapproving mother, a summer, a separation, a fiance who’s decent and doomed.
Gosling and McAdams are good and were both close to unknown, and the chemistry is real enough that it launched both of them into much larger careers. What they’re given is thinner than what they can do.
Their best work is in the small domestic stretch after the reunion, where two people who have been apart for years have to find out whether they still know each other. It’s the only part of the period story with any uncertainty in it, and it lasts about ten minutes.
The obstacles are all external. Allie’s mother intercepts letters, the war intervenes, a suitable man proposes. Nothing that keeps them apart comes from inside either of them. That’s the difference between a romance that lasts and one that’s merely delayed.
The rain sequence is the film’s famous set piece and it’s the one moment the romance has an argument in it. They fight about why he never wrote, and the fight is about class and pride instead of circumstance. That’s the scene the rest of the film needed more of.
I’ll grant the rain scene its fame. It’s the one time these two feel like adults with pride and grudges, and it’s the only stretch of the romance I’d watch again on its own. Then the film goes back to letters in drawers and a disapproving mother, and I lose interest.
James Marsden also deserves better than the film gives him. Lon is decent, generous, in love with her and entirely undeserving of what happens, and the picture needs him to be a mistake without ever showing that he’s one. He’s the clearest evidence that the romance runs on structure and not on choice.
Sparks and the Machine
Nicholas Sparks published the novel in 1996 and this was the second adaptation of his work, arriving before the pattern hardened into a genre of its own. The formula is visible here in its early form. A coastal setting, a class difference, a period of separation, a letter, and an illness. Almost every later Sparks adaptation runs the same components in a different order.
What this one has that the later ones don’t is the dementia frame, and Sparks has said it came from his wife’s grandparents, one of whom cared for the other through the illness for years. He’s described watching them and understanding that a whole marriage can live inside one ordinary act, repeated every day with no expectation that the person it’s for will recognize the one doing it.
That origin explains the imbalance. Sparks drew the frame from something observed and specific and constructed the romance from components, and you can feel the difference between the two halves in every transition.
That imbalance is what frustrates me about this film. Sparks had a real story in his hands, the old man at the bedside, and he wrapped it in parts off the shelf. I’d have traded the whole intercepted-letters subplot for ten more minutes of Garner reading.
Material drawn from observation reads differently from material drawn from a template, and readers detect it without being able to name it.
The practical consequence: put your observed material at the point everything depends on. This film’s frame is the observed part and it’s what people remember two decades on. You can build the rest from components without shame. Most stories contain assembled parts, and the assembled parts survive if something in the work is first-hand.
Why It Endured
Twenty-nine million dollars against about a hundred and eighteen worldwide, opened in June 2004 to mixed reviews, and became among the most durable romantic films of its era.
The ending is the mechanism. Duke gets into bed with Allie and they die together, holding hands, having had one final lucid conversation. It’s the wish the entire film exists to grant.
That’s a considerable piece of emotional engineering and it’s worth being clear-eyed about it. The film has spent two hours showing that the illness always wins, and then gives its characters an exit the illness doesn’t permit anybody in life.
The notebook itself is the better idea and the film underuses it. Allie wrote the story down while she still could, with instructions for him to read it to her. That means the whole arrangement was her plan and he’s executing it. She built her own treatment before she lost the ability to, and the film mentions this almost in passing.
The notebook being her plan is the idea I’d have built the whole movie around. It turns Allie from a patient into the author of her own care, and the film tosses it off in a line. That’s a bigger miss than anything in the romance. The audience knows this and doesn’t mind. That’s the whole business of romance as a genre. The contract is that the reader is offered something the world doesn’t supply, and objecting to it on realism grounds is refusing the terms.
The Real Verdict
It’s not the great romantic film its reputation claims and it’s considerably better than its detractors allow. That’s a common position for anything that becomes a cultural shorthand.
What it does badly is the thing it’s famous for. The young love story is generic, the obstacles are all imposed from outside, and the fiance exists to be a decent man in the way of a foregone conclusion.
What it does well is the thing nobody quotes. An eighty-year-old man reading to his wife every day, being introduced to her every day, and continuing anyway, is a portrait of marriage that almost no film attempts.
So the 6 is honest. Half a good film with two great performances in it, and if the whole picture had the courage of its frame it would be a considerably better one.
It’s worth noticing what the culture kept. The rain kiss is the image, quoted and parodied for twenty years, and the nursing home is the part nobody puts on a poster. A film gets remembered for its most reproducible moment. That’s almost never its best one.
Genre contracts are real and breaking them is a decision. A romance promises an emotional outcome the world withholds, and delivering it’s not a failure of nerve.
The failure is in the middle. Obstacles that come from outside your characters produce delay, and obstacles that come from inside them produce a story.
Test it by asking what your protagonists would do if nobody interfered. If the answer is that they’d simply be happy, you’ve written circumstance instead of character.
Should you watch The Notebook?
Yes, for Garner and Rowlands, and I’d forgive the rest of the film for their sake. The 6 is me splitting the difference between a nursing-home story I’d rate far higher and a summer romance I’d rate lower, where every obstacle comes from outside and the fiance exists to lose. The scene where she remembers him for five minutes and then loses him again is worth the whole running time.
