The Notebook

by Shari L. Rosenblum

Remember me when the candle lights are gleaming,
Remember me at the close of a long, long day.

In a rest home beside a lake, an old woman (Gena Rowlands), her faculty of recognition lost, her memory gone, is attended by a gentleman about her age (James Garner), who reads to her from a notebook of young lovers in their prime. She does not know him; the doctors tell him that she never will again; but he goes on. His faith prevails. For moments at a time, her eyes brighten: the tale rings familiar; the story stirs something in her. There's a hint of remembrance, a serenity of the soul. Rowlands, even in clichéd forgetfulness, commands herself with dignity; Garner, with a tinge of the maverick brought down, but not beaten, brings more substance than the role deserves.

It would be so sweet when all alone I'm dreaming
Just to know you still remember me.

That love does not forget is a theme that runs through the year's romantic fantasies; it is the heart of Adam Sandler's 50 First Dates, and the soul of Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Here the treatment is somewhat more conventional, designed to appeal to Harlequin hardcores and hoarders of Kleenex. Directed by Nick Cassavetes (Unhook the Stars) from the debut novel by tearjerker extraordinaire, Nicholas Sparks (Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember), the Jeremy Leven screenplay and Jan Sardi adaptation opts for treacly sentimentality over the other guys' sardonic self-consciousness and comic indulgence.

The sweetest songs belong to lovers in the gloaming,
The sweetest days are days that used to be.

The notebook's young lovers are Allie Hamilton (Rachel McAdams), a rich girl summering in sleepy, easy Seabrook , North Carolina, and Noah Calhoun (Ryan Gosling), the poor but honest local boy who swings from a ferris wheel to get her attention in the innocence before the war. World War II, that is. Bridging the tracks that run between their classes, they court and they spark, predictably and in familiar montages. They get caught in the rain, laugh over ice cream, seek sexual healing in an abandoned tumble-down mansion as unlikely to survive the summer's tumult as is their own unreserved passion. McAdams, who played the Queen Bee in Mean Girls and the titular hot chick in The Hot Chick, plays an entirely different kind of animal here -- genuinely steamy, but without the nasty sting, wholehearted and wholesome, even if her dresses are cut a bit too short for the era to which she pretends. Gosling, who in films like The Believer and Murder by Numbers has imbued the edgiest of characters with a tender spirit, here reverses the combustible chemistry, bringing a needed edge to a spirit so tender it risks melting into syrup at every turn. Together, despite the odds and the film's blatant manipulations, they make us fall in love with their falling in love. Something about the combination works -- his gaze, her open-mouthed giggle -- and it drags the unsuspecting naysayer (even a survivor of the 12-step recovery program) back into the middle earth of romance fiction, greedily grabbing for the power of the golden ring. I longed to love like that, be loved like that, be 17 again. Just once, just ever, just one more time.

The saddest words I ever heard were words of parting
When you said "Sweetheart, remember me."

But the end of summer is rarely kind to lovers such as these, and Allie and Noah find themselves torn apart by the insistence of her mother, with a secret of her own (a tight-lipped Joan Allen, overtaut and overwrought, and yet as real as a never-to-be mother-in-law I knew a lifetime ago), and the misunderstandings that doom young lovers to the once-upon-a-time. The war comes and goes, and the space between Allie and Noah is filled with years and circumstance they might never have anticipated.

You told me once that you were mine alone forever
And I was yours till the end of eternity.
But all those vows are broken now, and we will never
Be the same except in memory.

The film takes us back again and again to the old man and old woman at the rest home, alternating between the youthful vigor of passion and the quiet hopefulness of age, each time the effects of time and illness creep in and he needs to pause between the pages of the book. The screenplay and director play at coyness-- dancing around the connection between the young lovers and the old couple -- pretending to have us wonder whatever became of Noah and Allie, and if they were ever to meet again once that fateful Fall had ended their frenetic fling.

A brighter face may take my place when we're apart, dear,
A sweeter smile, a love more bold and free.
But in the end, fair weather friends may break your heart, dear.
If they do, sweetheart, remember me.

Having sent hundreds of letters to Allie, one a day for an entire year, but receiving no reply, Noah rebuilds his life by rebuilding that old house of theirs, with a little help from his dad (Sam Shepard, just as lazily, lustily charming as his movie son), homage to their abandoned passions. She, for reasons that will be apparent to anyone who has seen the trailer, having never received a single word from Noah, moves on without him. She recasts her life with the right kind of boy (James Marsden), of good family line and successful career, better looking but without the easy sensuality of her intense summer lover. Until . . . on the eve of her wedding, she glimpses a photo of Noah and the house in a local news item.

The film wants us to believe it isn't clear who Allie chooses in the end, but the man behind me in the theater had a guess early on (“I bet the old woman is that girl,” he said to his patient wife, “and I bet Duke (Garner) is that boy.”). I won't spoil the surprise for anyone who wants to make his or her own guess as to how it all turns out. Because that is not really the point of the film. The point -- saccharine, silly, and never really strong enough to jerk a tear from me -- still broke through to the sap behind my inner cynic. It made me want to believe, even as I shook my head in disbelief, that love will out. Will fill the summer, outlast the war, rise above class, outrun time, resist the frailty of the mind and exceed the limitations of medical science.

The Notebook is not a film for the hardened, the realist, or the strong of mind. But for those who want to tiptoe in and remember what it was like to think it might all just be a fairytale after all, it's worth a matinee.

Remember me when the candle lights are gleaming,
Remember me at the close of a long, long day.
It would be so sweet when all alone I'm dreaming
Just to know you still remember me.

Lyrics to "Remember Me" by Lulubelle and Scotty

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
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