Notebook
"The Notebook," the movie version of Nicholas Sparks' 1996 bestseller, may be corny, but it's also absorbing, sweet and powerfully acted. It's a film about falling in love and looking back on it, and it avoids many of the genre's syrupy dangers.
This picture, beautifully shaped and shot, filled with fine actors doing moving work, is based on Sparks' debut novel, a "Bridges of Madison County" sort of piece that unfolds in both the past and the present. In the past, two youngsters from different classes, Noah Calhoun and Allie Hamilton (Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams), fall madly in love. In the present, in a nursing home, an elderly man (James Garner) reads story from a notebook to an elderly woman (Gena Rowlands) who doesn't remember him.
The director, Nick Cassavetes, is Rowlands' son. He handles his mother, and the other actors, with tenderness and humanity--and that's the secret strength of the movie, along with the tension and poignancy of the parallel stories.
As we watch past and present juxtaposed, one love blossoms and the other seems to fade, but both have to fight to survive. As the movie, with epic range and generosity, covers a six-year span in the 1940s, from Noah and Allie's first teenage meeting to a postwar resolution, we get swept up in their longing and passion.
This picture, beautifully shaped and shot, filled with fine actors doing moving work, is based on Sparks' debut novel, a "Bridges of Madison County" sort of piece that unfolds in both the past and the present. In the past, two youngsters from different classes, Noah Calhoun and Allie Hamilton (Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams), fall madly in love. In the present, in a nursing home, an elderly man (James Garner) reads story from a notebook to an elderly woman (Gena Rowlands) who doesn't remember him.
The director, Nick Cassavetes, is Rowlands' son. He handles his mother, and the other actors, with tenderness and humanity--and that's the secret strength of the movie, along with the tension and poignancy of the parallel stories.
As we watch past and present juxtaposed, one love blossoms and the other seems to fade, but both have to fight to survive. As the movie, with epic range and generosity, covers a six-year span in the 1940s, from Noah and Allie's first teenage meeting to a postwar resolution, we get swept up in their longing and passion.
