The Notebook

Romance

Gena Rowlands	Allie Calhoun
Rachel McAdams	Allie
James Garner	Duke
Ryan Gosling	Noah Calhoun
Sam Shepard	Frank Calhoun
Joan Allen	Anne Hamilton
James Marsden	Lon Hammond
Kevin Connolly	Fin
David Thornton	John Hamilton
Tim Ivey	Rower

Director	Nick Cassavetes
Producer	Lynn Harris; Mark Johnson
Writer	Jeremy Leven; Nicholas Sparks
Cinematography	Robert Fraisse
Musician	Aaron Zigman

When you consider that old-fashioned tearjerkers are an endangered species in Hollywood, a movie like The Notebook can be embraced without apology. Yes, it's syrupy sweet and clogged with clichés, and one can only marvel at the irony of Nick Cassavetes directing a weeper that his late father John--whose own films were devoid of saccharine sentiment--would have sneered at. Still, this touchingly impassioned and great-looking adaptation of the popular Nicholas Sparks novel has much to recommend, including appealing young costars (Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams) and appealing old costars (James Garner and Gena Rowlands, the director's mother) playing the same loving couple in (respectively) early 1940s and present-day North Carolina. He was poor, she was rich, and you can guess the rest; decades later, he's unabashedly devoted, and she's drifting into the memory-loss of senile dementia. How their love endured is the story preserved in the titular notebook that he reads to her in their twilight years. The movie's open to ridicule, but as a delicate tearjerker it works just fine. Message in a Bottle and A Walk to Remember were also based on Sparks novels, suggesting a triple-feature that hopeless romantics will cherish. --Jeff Shannon