The Notebook (2004) Review

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 is not decoration. The whole film is a man performing an act of maintenance on somebody who cannot remember him, and the period material is what he is using to do it.

The Frame Is the Film

Gena Rowlands plays Allie in the present, and the direction was by her son Nick Cassavetes, which is a fact that sits underneath every scene between her and Garner.

What Rowlands does is play a woman who is entirely present and entirely unmoored. She is polite, curious, engaged with the story, and has no idea that the man telling it is her husband. There is no fog and no vacancy in the performance, which is 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 cannot 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.

The film is also unusually accurate about the mechanics. The staff manage him instead of her. His children want him to come home and cannot understand why he stays. A doctor explains, gently and more than once, that what he is attempting does not work and that he should stop. Every institution in the film is telling him to be reasonable and he declines.

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 is decent and doomed.

Gosling and McAdams are good and were both close to unknown, and the chemistry is real enough that it carried both of them into much larger careers. What they are 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 is 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, which is the difference between a romance that lasts and one that is merely delayed.

The rain sequence is the film’s famous set piece and it is 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, which is the scene the rest of the film needed more of.

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 is one. He is 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 subsequent Sparks adaptation runs the same components in a different order.

What this one has that the later ones do not 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 has described watching them and understanding that the whole of a marriage can be contained in an ordinary daily act performed every day without any expectation of return or recognition from the one person in the world for whom the whole exercise was ever intended.

That origin explains the imbalance. The frame is drawn from something observed and specific, and the romance is constructed from components, and you can feel the difference between the two halves in every transition.

Why It Endured

Twenty-nine million dollars against about a hundred and eighteen worldwide, opened in June 2004 to mixed reviews, and became one of 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 is the wish the entire film exists to grant.

That is a considerable piece of emotional engineering and it is worth being clear-eyed about it. The film has spent two hours demonstrating that the illness always wins, and then gives its characters an exit the illness does not 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, which means the whole arrangement was her plan and he is executing it. She built her own treatment before she lost the ability to, and the film mentions this almost in passing.

The audience knows this and does not mind, which is the whole business of romance as a genre. The contract is that the reader is offered something the world does not supply, and objecting to it on realism grounds is refusing the terms.

The Honest Verdict

It is not the great romantic film its reputation claims and it is considerably better than its detractors allow, which is a common position for anything that becomes a cultural shorthand.

What it does badly is the thing it is 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 is 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, which is almost never its best one.

Should you watch The Notebook?

Yes, for James Garner and Gena Rowlands. The summer romance is what everybody remembers and the nursing home is where the film is really working, and the scene where she remembers him for five minutes and then loses him again is worth the whole running time.

Frequently Asked Questions