#The notebook movie movie#

The director is Nick Cassavetes, son of Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, and perhaps his instinctive feeling for his mother helped him find the way past soap opera in the direction of truth.

Now here is a story that could have been a tearjerker, but - no, wait, it is a tearjerker, it's just that it's a good one.

#The notebook movie movie#

The movie is based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks, whose books inspired 'Message in a Bottle' (1999), unloved by me, and ' A Walk to Remember' (2002), which was so sweet and positive it persuaded me (as did Mandy Moore as its star). Allie thinks her parents do not love each other, but her mother insists they do still, Allen is such a precise actress that she is able to introduce the quietest note of regret into the scene. He's not for you.' One day her mother ( Joan Allen) shows her a local working man, who looks hard-used by life, and tells Allie that 25 years ago she was in love with him. Noah loves her the moment he sees her, and actually hangs by his hands from a bar on a Ferris wheel until she agrees to go out with him. His father ( Sam Shepard) is centered and supportive. He's a local kid who works at the sawmill but is smart and poetic. She's a rich kid, summering at the family's mansion in North Carolina. The performances are suited to the material, respecting the passion at the beginning and the sentiment at the end, but not pushing too hard there is even a time when young Noah tells Allie, 'I don't see how it's gonna work,' and means it, and a time when Allie gets engaged to another man. As young people, by Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling. As old people they're played by Gena Rowlands and James Garner. The lovers are named Allie Nelson and Noah Calhoun, known as Duke. In life it is more likely to be pain, drugs, regret and despair. The reason we cried during ' Terms of Endearment' was not because the mother was dying, but because she was given the opportunity for a dignified and lucid parting with her children. 'The Notebook' is a sentimental fantasy, but such fantasies are not harmful we tell ourselves stories every day, to make life more bearable. But when the curtain comes down, there is never another act and the play is over. For a time, in the earlier stages of the disease, it does. We all wish Alzheimer's could permit such moments.