'The Notebook' is a crowd-pleaser

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By Chris Hewit
Saint Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press

Posted: June 25, 2004

James Garner has reached a point at which he's so honest and endearing that he functions like a Get Out of Script Trouble Free card.

Garner has a supporting role in "The Notebook," but he's such a pleasure to watch that he elevates the quality of the entire film. It tells two love stories — one between nursing home residents Garner and Gena Rowlands, and another, set in the '40s, that Garner reads to Rowlands from a notebook. For once, a movie manages to sustain two storylines of equal interest, instead of annoying us with a lesser one that keeps yanking us away from the better one.

Garner and Rowlands, the acting equivalent of national monuments, bring simplicity and many-years-under-their-belts candor to their roles, and we have no choice but to believe every word they say.

There's a high cornball factor in "The Notebook," but sensitive acting keeps coming to the rescue. Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams do a very tricky thing, nimbly playing their characters at both 17 and 25. And Joan Allen shines in the role of supporting bitch, a wealthy mother who wears spiffy shirtwaist dresses and blocks the course of true love. Allen drops early hints that her character deserves our understanding (this is a rare movie that realizes "bad guys" should be as sympathetic as good), and darned if she doesn't turn out to be like Shrek: someone who looks like an ogre but turns out to be a human with a beating heart.

"The Notebook" looks like a schmaltzfest but turns out to be a tearjerker that earns its tears. Director Nick Cassavetes gives it a lush visual style that seems meant to remind us of "Splendor in the Grass," which "Notebook" resembles more than a little. Taking a page from "Splendor's" book, "Notebook" has an old-fashioned, dreamy, everything-is-riding-on-this-romance quality, and it will be interesting to see if audiences respond to that in this era of friends with privileges and premature cynicism about love.

Cassavetes announces his nostalgic intentions from the start. The almost too-pretty opening shot — a rowboat, with white swans flying overhead — is lovely, peaceful and a little sad, and it sets the tone for the lovely, peaceful, little-bit-sad film that follows.