Good thing she bought a notebook big enough....

Last night The Wife and I watched The Notebook, a tearjerker romance movie that came out a year or so ago. It came heavily recommended by a number of friends of mine, and I did like it, although not as much as they all did. I was a decent rental, but I'm glad I didn't try to see it in the theater.



(Spoilers follow!)



The movie opens with an old guy in a nursing home, played by James Garner, sitting down to read to an old woman (played by Gena Rowlands). He's reading the story of two people (Noah and Allie) who met and fell in love in their pre-World War II youths sixty years or so before, and as the film goes on, it becomes clear that the Garner and Rowlands characters are that same couple, in their old age, with Old Allie suffering from Alzheimer's or some similar ailment that is destroying her memories. Garner reads to her in an effort to reconnect with her, and apparently while most times it doesn't work, Old Allie does have good days when she does remember who the nice man who's come to read to her actually is. (Of course, the movie takes place during one of the good days.)

The main problem I had with The Notebook was that the story of the youthful Noah and Allie is really little more than your standard movie romance, chock-full of so many cliches that it's frankly amazing to me that the film works at all. He's a blue-collar guy who dreams of buying the rundown plantation so he can restore it to its old glory; she's the spoiled rich family's daughter with the mother who looks down her nose at Noah. They have a fairly clicheed meeting, when Noah spots Allie at a county fair, is asking her out within minutes, and is performing some kind of weird stunt to earn her affections within minutes after that. It's just your basic "Guy from the wrong side of the tracks" kind of tale, that for the most part plays out with not too many surprises. Of course the two lovers are going to have a major fight when the family moves away for the year; of course young Noah's going to go off to World War II; of course they're both going to move onto to other things and other loves before they meet again almost by pure, dumb luck.

It's the film's framing device, with Old Noah reading the tale of their romance to Old Allie, that makes the film more than just an exercise in romantic cliche. However, I almost think that I would have liked it better if the ending had somehow revealed that James Garner wasn't Old Noah, but the older version of the man Allie left, or might have left. This would have made the ending terribly haunting, as a man who (presumably) led a happy life with Allie only to see her lose her memories works so hard to reconnect with her, and only succeeds in making her reconnect with the other guy. Oh, well. (It would have helped if the film's ending, which seems almost mystical, had been more grounded in the film's subtext to that point, which seems to have had nothing to do with the "magic" and "unending timelessness" of love. Also, I didn't feel a great deal of convincing chemistry between Young Noah and Young Allie.)

This theme of the relationship between memory and love was dealt with much more effectively in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But this film has its charms, too. It's not a bad film, by any means -- but it felt, for the most part, like an interesting story within a "paint by numbers" film.