The Notebook

A big, sweeping, romantic, traditional love story set in the American deep south is probably not the kind of film you would expect from the son of one of the most important pioneers in hard-hitting American independent cinema, but Nick Cassavetes has been moving away from his indie roots and proudly demonstrated his allegiance to popular cinema with John Q in 2002. With The Notebook, adapted from Nicholas Sparks’ bestselling romantic fiction novel, he takes a further step in the direction of good old-fashioned, traditional filmmaking, harking back to a more innocent period and sweeping the viewer along with him.

At a hospital where she is being treated, an old lady (Gina Rowlands) suffering from senile dementia is read a story from a book by another patient, Duke (James Garner). He reads her a deeply romantic story about Noah Calhoun (Ryan Gosling), a country boy with a lot of nerve who charms the beautiful, educated, 17 year-old city girl Allie Hamilton (Rachel McAdams) into going out with him. They spend a blissful summer together, despite their combative and fiery natures. At the end of summer however, their fairytale romance comes to an end – circumstances, fate, college, the war and Allie’s parents keep them apart. When Noah comes back from the war, he is a different man, but he hasn’t forgotten Allie and believes that when the time is right, Allie will come back to him.

Looking at the film objectively and at a distance, it’s easy to see how all the elements fit together to make a successful movie. The summer romance is textbook stuff – love at first sight at a fairground, the daring of a poor boy with no prospects to set his sights so determinedly on a beautiful rich girl who is way out of his league, the playing out of the perfect summer romance, the couple running into the crashing waves on the beach and basking in the golden glow of a sunset by the river. It’s a perfect romance, a true love story and when fate conspires to keep them apart, the sheer cruel injustice of those circumstances only makes their inevitable reencounter all the more poignant.

In some ways, this kind of storyline makes The Notebook a difficult film to review – it’s a classic romantic melodrama and it’s impossible to put it into words the lushness and the warm glow that you feel when you are watching it. It’s also natural for a reviewer sitting back some time later at a computer screen and no longer under the spell of the film to want to step back and look at the film objectively from a little distance, but if I were to do so I’d be doing the film an injustice. This is not a film to sit back and evaluate – looking at it afterwards there is the tendency to want to play down how easily the film’s manipulative, sentimental, romantic and largely predictable storyline swept you along unquestioningly when the whole point is that for 2 hours The Notebook can hold you, unquestioningly and acceptingly in its spell.

At least in that way, The Notebook becomes easy to review and recommend. If you enjoy a more innocent type of filmmaking – and for all its apparent adherence to the conventions of romantic melodrama, the film never betrays the viewer with a calculated knowingness or incongruous elements that could break the spell – The Notebook is a return to that style of filmmaking. There’s nothing soft or weak about its unashamedly emotional storyline – the characters and the situations are robust and the performances – Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, James Garner and Gena Rowlands in the main roles, but Joan Allen and Sam Shepard are also excellent in supporting roles – are without exception credible and compelling. The characters are well-drawn, avoiding easy black and white, good guy/bad guy characteristics and the film is all the more successful for it. The key to the film’s success however is in its very simplicity – successfully matching the original novel’s charm at recreating a simpler world, with clearly defined lines of behaviour and attitudes that the couple has to transgress to be together. This creation of a romanticised, perfect world is for a lot of people what cinema is all about. And even if, in a harder-hearted and more cynical world, such films tend to be categorised as “guilty pleasures”, then so be it, but it is a pleasure nonetheless.

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DVD
Video
There is not too much wrong with the picture quality on the Region 2 release. The image is crystal clear and as sharp as a razor – perhaps a little too sharp. Occasionally, figures can look a little like cut-outs against bright backgrounds and even the natural film grain looks too sharp – but there is little sign of any overt edge enhancement. Colours are bright, clear and warm, blacks are deep and solid and even night-time scenes show strong contrasts and a lot of shadow detail. There are no other digital artefacts or compression issues here – the image remains stable and solid throughout. Dust spots and marks are not an issue. The only real problem I came across was the brightness flaring for a few seconds in one scene near the end of the film.

Audio
There is the choice of Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround and Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks. The 5.1 mix doesn’t over-use the rear speakers, but they are active at appropriate points, becoming properly noticeable for the first time only during the brief war scenes. Voices, mainly on the centre speaker, can occasionally sound a little low and dull – I had to switch to the subtitles once or twice to catch some muffled dialogue – but for the most part, the audio is clear.

Extras
Deleted/Alternate Scenes (27:17)
12 deleted scenes or alternate takes are included here in anamorphic widescreen, with optional commentary from the editor Alan Heim. The cuts are for various reasons, some for the MPAA PG-13 rating, some scenes just didn’t work and others were cut to reduce the 3-hour first cut down to the final 2-hour runtime. There’s a lot here, but it’s mostly worth a look.

Commentary by Nick Cassavetes
The director talks mainly about casting the actors and how and why each scene was shot. There is a lot of gushing backslapping and credit for the cast and crew and also a lot of behind-the-scenes secrets revealed – neither of which make for a good commentary in my books. Cassavetes is however very informative, thorough and misses nothing out. You can at least tell how much he believes in the love story, which is undoubtedly why it works so well as a film.

Commentary by Nicholas Sparks
I personally found the commentary by the author of the original bestselling novel much more interesting. The author talks about the real-life origins of the story and the historical background of the American south during the period the story is set, as well as analysing the nature of romantic love stories and giving his thoughts on the changes the story underwent in its transition from page to screen.

All In The Family: Nick Cassavetes (11:40)
A rather condescending tone in the narration baby-talks the viewer through a EPK-type making of, which has all the usual back-slapping gloss you would expect from this type of feature. The interviews are not particularly interesting or revealing, just saying how wonderful the director is.

Nicholas Sparks: A Simple Story Well Told (6:36)
The title sums up perfectly the reasons for the success of Sparks’ novels. This little featurette covers writer’s rise to success on his first published novel, which was ‘The Notebook’. It’s interesting, but again the cloying tone will make you sick.

Southern Exposure: Locating ‘The Notebook’ (11:33)
This feature looks at the locations chosen for shooting the film in North Charleston and South Carolina and how they tried to recreate the period of the 1940s.

Casting
This is broken into two sections – a tediously narrated Casting Rachel and Ryan (4:07) and Rachel McAdams’ Screen Test (3:37), where you can see exactly why she got the part.

Trailer (2:08)
The trailer looks great but gives absolutely everything away. Avoid this if you haven't seen the film already.

Overall
Just so that I make myself clear and don’t mislead the reader in any way – yes, The Notebook is one of those tear-jerking, romantic weepies, but like the best movies of this type it treads the balance between credibility and sentimentality well and with conviction. It's not hard to recommend this film - if you enjoy the guilty pleasure of watching a deeply romantic weepie of lovers separated by circumstance and adversity and their search to rediscover what they ought to have had together, they don’t make them much better than this. The Notebook is a beautifully made romantic melodrama that gives you everything you could want from such a film with an excellent and sympathetic cast, so it’s surprising that the film has largely passed unnoticed without the due attention it deserves. EIV present the film exceptionally well on DVD with a large selection of extra features, but the repetition of the music on the menus and the sickly extra features might over-sweeten the package a little too much.