The Notebook

6 out of 7

There isn’t much to say about overly sappy love stories, except that anyone with a heart will inevitably be drawn to them. So it is with The Notebook (2004), the Nicolas Sparks novel turned sentimental sensation.

The film has a metanarrative of Duke reading a story to Allie in a retirement home. It doesn’t take long (or much guessing for that matter) to discover that the young lovers in the story Duke reads are Duke and Allie in their youth. Time, however, has taken its toll, particularly on Allie, whose mind has begun to falter to the point that she no longer recognizes her husband or children. But Duke, who begins the movie with some of the most touching sentiments in film when he says, “I am nothing special; just a common man with common thoughts, and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten. But in one respect I have succeeded as gloriously as anyone who's ever lived: I've loved another with all my heart and soul; and to me, this has always been enough,” has a stance that love may just conquer all.

The main story (that of Young Noah and Young Allie) is touching, if not a little trite, but by surrounding it with the greater story of love in its twilight years, everything witnessed takes on a deeper meaning.

With a constant whirlwind of debate around marriage in our culture, all would probably benefit from an honest viewing of this film. Don’t get caught up in the romance (though it is great), nor allow yourself to cry (except when appropriate), but really ponder the significance and power of pure matrimony. Such a viewing puts petty debates of tax rights into their appropriate place.

The story’s moral can’t be found in the story of the two young lovers, but rather the story of the two old lovers. When a doctor cautions Duke from trying to revive Allie’s deteriorating memory by reading to her, he calm ticks off that “where science ends, God begins,” and so the viewer is left no option but to try to understand love in its deepest meaning.

The film ends with the two lovers – once young, now old – dying together in a nursing home bed. For these two it is a miracle of Love and the film does little, if anything, to dissuade the viewer from such a stance. On their final night together, Allie recognizes Duke without the aid of the story and questions how long they have and how long they’ve been living like this. It is she who hopes that Love will bring them to an end together.

What is interesting about this film is that its significance is found in love that has aged and matured and weathered all sorts of toil and trouble. In fact, it might be that for any love story to truly succeed, it needs to be told from the perspective of love near its completion. A friend challenged me after viewing the film to try to think of a romantic film (not a romantic comedy) that isn’t a period piece. He reasoned that by using the time period of the 40’s and 50’s, there is an implicit innocence that amplifies the love on the screen. While I certainly see merit in such thoughts, I believe more that love in its infancy, while magnificent to live through (and even enjoyable to view), is less significant if we don’t know how it ends. Inevitably this film would have boiled down to some simple conflict of man vs. man or man vs. society if not for the metanarrative. The viewer would be left with Titanic – just a story of a boy overcoming social classes and another lover to be with the woman he is supposed to be with. The Notebook goes that extra step further and lets the tragedy be found not in the untimely death of young love, but the timely death of it, and in doing so, demonstrates that there is no “timely” end for love; it is a tragedy at any age.

The Notebook takes on serious issues of our culture, including the significance of marriage, respect for the elderly and the emotional impacts of the increasingly frequent dementia attacking the elderly in their last years. These are emotionally-charged issues for most who’ve had to encounter them personally and the story handles them all very well.

The film does not succeed without the superb acting of James Garner, who plays Duke. He adds a maturity and lovingness that will take in even the staunchest cynic. Go ahead and rent this film the next time you’re with your lover, but don’t treat it so lightly.