Cornpone and treacle
The Notebook is a hokey bag of Southern cliches
Nick Cassavetes' The Notebook borrows cliches from every teary-eyed contemporary Hollywood melodrama, then heaps them one atop another, resulting in a whole lot of derivative hokum.
Framed by a geriatric bracketing device (a la Fried Green Tomatoes), The Notebook opens as an aging gentleman (James Garner) entertains a fellow nursing home resident (Gena Rowlands) by reading her the saccharine love story of Allie (Rachel McAdams) and Noah (Ryan Gosling), a pair of star-crossed lovers in 1940s North Carolina.
Though undeniably cute, Allie and Noah are about as flavorful as a mayonnaise sandwich. The repeated flashbacks to their histrionic, chemistry-deficient love affair make The Notebook an excruciating ordeal.
Noah and Allie are, in helpful voice-over narration provided by Garner, established as polar opposites. In a nutshell: "He was a country boy, she was from the city." Yess'r there weren't two kids put on this green earth with less in common.
Despite such insurmountable geographic obstacles, the pair fall hard for each other one overripe Southern summer (though summer in The Notebook frequently produces unseasonal bursts of frosty breath from its characters).
Cassavetes has one-upped even Dem-Ole-Times-Wuz-Fine romantic Joel Chandler Harris in his portrait of the segregated South. It's a blissful Eden of dilapidated, moss-covered plantations, black and white folk staging impromptu jam sessions on front porches, and golden-lit young bodies cavortin' at ye olde swimming hole. Even the fat white moon looks like the DreamWorks logo.
Everything from set design to dialogue to historical detail in The Notebook feels fake in this adaptation of crybaby novelist Nicholas Sparks' best-selling book. About the only authentic thing is the snaggletooth grin of Sam Shepard, who plays Noah's daddy. A poetic blue-collar worker who keeps a stock of Walt Whitman on hand to convince us of his sensitivity, he sanctifies their relationship by cooking them a midnight snack of pancakes.
But Allie's mama (Joan Allen) and daddy (David Thornton) don't take too kindly to their highborn daughter's gallivanting with "trash, trash, trash" as Allen wails in her best Tennessee Williams drawl.
Daddy — who appears to be sporting some lady's mink stole on his upper lip — defers to his hysterical wife's desire to separate the lovers by yanking Allie back to Charleston. World events soon conspire to drive a further wedge between the pair when WWII intrudes (Cassavetes' hilariously abbreviated wartime montage eats about a minute out of the film's two-plus hours of screen time).
Unable to muster some spark of passion between its leads, The Notebook tries to convey heart-stopping love with gimmicks, like that craaaaazy boy Noah demanding a date from Allie by hanging from a Ferris wheel, or later convincing her of his free spiritedness by lying in the middle of the road. Allie answers Noah's youthful zest for life by entering nearly every scene at full sprint, lest we overlook her own coltish joie de vivre.
Viewers will guess where the nursing home story is going within minutes, but director Cassavetes seems to believe he's holding us in suspense by a golden cord during the film's grueling exposition. Garner and Rowlands give a touch of integrity and true pathos to a film that is otherwise as superficial and empty as one of those Vanity Fair spreads dedicated to pretty new Hollywood flesh. The Notebook's example of Hollywood-lite is painful evidence that Nick, whose indie daddy John Cassavetes got into the hearts and souls of his characters, is most definitely not a chip off the old block.