Kat's Film Reviews: The Notebook

Thursday, October 07, 2004

The Notebook

All women should take their husbands/partners to this movie, if only to ask "so, do you love me THAT much?" On the surface, the film seems like a conventional young love story, but it is interspersed with a similar tale of unrequited love, only this is between an elderly man and the wife who can't remember who he is anymore. He reads a beautiful story every day to her, trying to bring back her memories. James Garner and Gena Rowlands play the husband and wife, and they are the main reasons to see this film, as they effortlessly bring these characters into our hearts. The movie is based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks, and it follows it religiously (I think there was one scene which I didn't remember from the book). The sappy romance-novel part of the book is handled graciously in the film (except for Noah carrying Allie up the stairs with his pants down around his ankles -- yeah, right) and the trajectory of the young couple in love is more than adequately rendered by Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, both relative newcomers to the film industry (McAdams was the meanest girl in Mean Girls). They have a palpable chemistry together, and effectively play their different acting styles off each other, making their characters more believable. If there is a flaw, Gosling doesn't always make visible the depth of his character's feeling. His character is supposed to be taciturn, but you'll see how this is somewhat unbelievable as the film continues. The best scene does belong to him, though -- the scene next to the car as she is about to leave him a second time. McAdams' reaction is that of every woman if the man she loved revealed this.

year: 2004
length: 124 min.
rating: 3.5
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0332280/combined

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