Carla Acheson

Usually, I read a book and love it or hate, then I watch the film that is based on the book and usually hate it!

So here’s something different…

I watched ‘The Notebook’ based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks, without having read the novel itself. I cannot therefore make comparisons which is probably a good thing, because everybody knows (or even expects) a  good book to turn into a shoddy adaptation. I am now curiously interested in reading the book to set my new theory in motion, and see how I would view the book after seeing the film.

Anyway skipping over to my thoughts of this story as a whole, well it most definitely is a heart wrenching marmite covered film. You’ll either love it or hate it, and I suspect a large percentage of women love it, and quite a lot of men would rather stick their heads down a toilet. Bluntly put, I believe it is probably the mushiest of mushy films ever to hit our screens in quite a while. 

And it goes something like this.. Hopelessly poor boy meets rich society girl and instills a sense of freedom in her. After her initial spew of disgust and disinterest, she begins to fall for the poor hapless soul and the two make up a hot-headed unlikely pairing, which probably nearly every teen the world over has experienced at some point. 

As expected, as soon as the romance reaches cataclysmically intense proportions, parental disapproval forces them to part ways, and as expected once again, they meet much later on when life had already taken them down different paths, thus forcing them to evaluate the strength of their feelings for each other. 

A parallel scene running through all of this, is the much older heroine (who suffers from Alzheimers) being read the entire love story from a notebook. Whilst the love story itself is quite typically a well known scenario in many people’s lives, it is this parallel scene which I think holds some important key meaning, and a distinctive echo of sadness. 

How many of us really know that much, or care about the declining memories of our older generation? Can you imagine spending an entire lifetime with someone, and in your final years together they can’t even remember your name? Brought to the fore throughout the film, this aspect added a definite bittersweet feel, (not to mention an acute fear of aging,) plus it made the whole story sentimental enough to cause some seriously excessive tissue crumpling moments. I am sure many people did not leave the cinema with a dry eye after seeing this film, myself included!

My one reservation was in the plot itself, which if you took all the meat off the literary bones, could quite easily be written on the back of a postage stamp. As far as plots go, yes it is thin and unremarkably predictable, however the nature of Gosling and Mc Adams romantic portrayal seemed authentic enough to carry the audience through. The chemistry between them lit up the screen and showed some talented acting, which made it all the more worthwhile. Thoroughly worth watching!