The Notebook

Okay, so this is a movie I would never seen as a bachelor. But now I have a girlfriend, and after moving in with her she asked if I could rent this film, which she's always wanted to see. Anything for love.

The Notebook is not a good movie. It isn't aggressively terrible, but it has almost no depth and its characters are idealized. The strange thing is is that it was directed by Nick Cassavetes. His father John's films were the antithesis of this kind of slick, boilerplate dross.

The film is based on a novel by notorious bad writer Nicholas Sparks, who writes books for women. This film is really for women, too. My girlfriend cried and cried when it was over. I was dry-eyed, but I liked the way she responded emotionally to it.

Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams star in the story-within-the-story. In the present, James Garner reads their story to Gena Rowlands, a woman with Alzheimer's disease. We quickly figure out that Garner is telling their own story, which Rowlands has forgotten.

The story begins in 1940, when Gosling, a laborer, meets McAdams, daughter of a rich man, at a carnival. In a horrible meet-cute scene, Gosling climbs a Ferris wheel and demands she go out with him, or he'll drop to his death. Sure, I know lots of couples who meet that way. Later, Gosling charms her by laying down in the middle of the street. Somehow she finds this endearing.

They fall in love, though they fight a lot. Her family tolerates it as a summer romance, but when things get serious they pack her up and move her back to their winter home. She goes off to college, and Gosling writes her every day, but her mother (Joan Allen) intercepts the letters.

McAdams ends up engaged to a rich guy (James Marsden), whom she loves, but when she sees Gosling's picture in the paper she looks him up. He has bought and restored an eighteenth-century mansion. Why no one else noted the real estate potential of such a building is lost on me.

McAdams faces a choice, and of course we know who she'll pick. However, as Garner is reading the story, for one moment I had the fleeting hope that it was a twist--that Garner was actually Marsden grown up. That would have been a hell of a twist, but no, this movie was far too predictable for that.

The Notebook is the Hallmark version of romance, with golden sunsets and lakes full of geese, flying in slow motion. It's very pretty, but the sentiment is pretty simple. I know a lot of people, mostly women, love this film, and I suppose it's because they want to see their own lives with as much love as these two have. But the truth is that the love expressed here is a fairy tale, with no bearing on reality that a fire-breathing dragon. I suppose that's the difference between men and women--women want the fairy tale.