The Notebook (2004) – 8.1

From the looks of it, the most you could expect out of a movie like The Notebook is a searingly painful headache; maybe an ulcer, worst-case scenario.  It takes place in a nursing home where James Garner reads aloud a love story (from an actual notebook – forehead-slap) to Gina Rowlands, who suffers – apparently very well-groomedly – from Alzheimer’s.  Ryan Gosling and Rachel MacAdams play the story’s young lovers, Allie and Noah, in flashbacks.  The film’s only whiff of suspense surrounds whether the old folks are the latter-day versions of the young couple.  Otherwise, you get a pretty stock love story about the rich girl who falls for the poor working-class boy – meet cute, fall in love, bicker about family commitments and money, separate during the war, find each other, girl’s gotten engaged, dumps the fiancé, get back together again, happy ever after.

Under any other circumstance, I’d tell you to run for the hills.  But in spite of its razor-thin premise, it ends up succeeding much more than it deserves, almost entirely thanks to the talents of the two young leads, whose chemistry is palpable.  The scenes between them are beautifully, patiently acted, with an effortless charm that is exceedingly rare in Hollywood movies today.  They can’t help but enrich the audience’s perception of the latter-day couple; by the time that Garner and Rowlands, with their faded looks and bear-like waistlines, close things out, the film has become an unusually sympathetic and nearly believable portrayal of enduring love.  It also features several gratuitously wonderful supporting performances, including Joan Allen as Allie’s mother and Sam Shepard as Noah’s father.

Like The Shawshank Redemption (1994), The Notebook has been earning a steady word-of-mouth following since its brief spell in theaters last year.  The two films share many things in common, including a deeply American sense of nostalgia and an almost childlike view of life’s trials.  As a prison, Shawshank comes off as nothing more than a couple years of summer camp for grown men, while The Notebook’s portrayal of Alzheimer’s seems like a prolonged, not altogether unpleasant case of amnesia.  Yet both films still succeed on the merits of their sincerity.  They manage to endow their themes with a surprising level of resonance – after all, is it really so unnatural for humans to romanticize some of the most painful aspects of life? That modern audiences can be won over by films like these is a triumph for the old-fashioned tearjerker, which demands nothing more than a temporary suspension of irony.

Don’t get me wrong – many would do well to stay away from The Notebook.  But for those who can appreciate an unusually well-done variation on age-old corniness, few films satisfy as well as this one.