movie review about the notebook

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The Notebook

Where to watch.

Watch The Notebook with a subscription on Netflix, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

It's hard not to admire its unabashed sentimentality, but The Notebook is too clumsily manipulative to rise above its melodramatic clichés.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Nick Cassavetes

Ryan Gosling

Noah Calhoun

Rachel McAdams

Allie Hamilton

James Garner

Gena Rowlands

Allie Calhoun

James Marsden

User reviews

The Notebook

A touching movie.

May 12, 2020

My Favorite Scene was the One with the Geese, not the Gosling

Jun 17, 2005

The ending makes more than up for occasional weaknesses from the previous 90 minutes

Horst_In_Translation
Jan 1, 2017

the notebook was a truly remarkable film

Nov 23, 2004
filmnoir500
Feb 9, 2005

SImple but wonderful

[email protected]
Feb 14, 2005

The Notebook : Based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks

Jun 28, 2004

Just beautiful!

punk_rawk_princez
Feb 2, 2005

Good but doesn't know when to end

tangreat-bk
Apr 10, 2018

Unabashedly Romantic and Sentimental. It's Storytelling at its Best

Feb 25, 2005

Must-Cry Movie

IamtheRegalTreatment

An Heartwarming movie that makes your insides go mushy with emotions!!!

jameslamont
Jan 2, 2005

Mostly enjoyable, but also too formulaic and overly sentimental

Jul 12, 2004

Like a poorly made "Hallmark Hall of Fame" special

dallas_viewer

Moves you deeply

hip_hop_headz
Mar 3, 2005

Brilliant movie

gauthierbouma
Aug 28, 2022

I have not been so moved by a movie before!

Feb 11, 2005

I have yet to see a film this decade that touched me as much as The Notebook did

TheLittleSongbird
Sep 2, 2010

Everything wrong with society

gsceldridge
Oct 5, 2012

Bad Script, Good Actors.

peachy_avacado
Sep 22, 2004

Simply stunning

Jan 5, 2012

Like mother, like daughter. Southern Belles.

Jul 19, 2004

That's my sweetheart in there......

yusri-45920
Jul 11, 2020

well made traditional romance

SnoopyStyle
Jun 13, 2014

cliché of the clichés...

Dec 3, 2006

FILM REVIEW; When Love Is Madness And Life a Straitjacket

By Stephen Holden

June 25, 2004

Young love -- the old-fashioned kind that flourished before the age of the hook-up -- has always been one of the most challenging emotions to portray on the screen with any specificity. Beyond the smooches, sighs, and adoring glances, how do you convey the reality of a shared, private paradise?

In the strongest scenes of ''The Notebook,'' the screen adaptation of Nicholas Sparks's treacly best seller, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams break through the barrier to evoke high-strung, slightly crazed teenagers plunging headlong into first love. It is passion that begins in playfulness. Their performances are so spontaneous and combustible that you quickly identify with the reckless sweethearts, who embody an innocence that has all but vanished from American teenage life. And against your better judgment, you root for the pair to beat the odds against them.

The romantic drama, directed by Nick Cassavetes from a screenplay by Jeremy Leven and adapted by Jan Sardi from the novel, opens today nationwide. It is told in flashback as Duke (James Garner), a garrulous, ailing old codger in a comfortable nursing home, reads aloud excerpts of a love story to Allie Calhoun (Gena Rowlands), a patient suffering from Alzheimer's. She is so smitten with the 1940's tale of Noah (Mr. Gosling), a poor Southern boy who works in a lumberyard, and his wealthy girlfriend, also named Allie (Ms. McAdams), that for brief intervals his readings jog her blurred memory into focus.

As the movie seesaws between Seabrook, N.C., in the summer of 1940, when Noah and Allie meet at a fairground, and the present, it is deliberately (and annoyingly) coy as to who these oldsters might be. Gosh, could they be the same young lovers six decades later?

Mr. Garner and Ms. Rowlands are wonderful actors, but Mr. Garner, in particular, plays ''old'' with a hammy avuncularity that sugarcoats his character with a glaze of nostalgia. His performance reinforces the impression that in Hollywood, old age is even more difficult to depict with real honesty than young love. Ms. Rowlands's Allie is quieter and sadder, but she looks too well-preserved for a woman in her condition, and as the story leaps back and forth, the movie veers between unbleached sugar and artificial sweetener.

When Noah meets Allie, he is so desperate to impress her that he hangs on the rungs of a Ferris wheel and threatens to jump if she won't go out with him. Even at the beginning, Mr. Gosling's performance emphasizes Noah's slightly creepy streak of fanaticism. After the lovers have separated, he withdraws into himself, grows a beard, and with a small inheritance from his poetry-loving father (Sam Shepard), a Walt Whitman fan, he converts the rotting old mansion he once dreamed of sharing with Allie into the showplace he promised to build for her. He also serves in World War II, where he sees his best friend die in the Battle of the Bulge.

Ms. McAdams, who played the alpha queen in ''Mean Girls,'' matches Mr. Gosling's Noah in idiosyncratic verve. Impulsive, giggly and combative, she exudes the air of a careless rich girl bursting out of a bubble, until the moment her stern, watchful mother, Anne (Joan Allen), puts her foot down and ends the relationship.

The scenes between the young lovers confronting adult authority have the same seething tension and lurking hysteria that the young Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood brought more than 40 years ago to their roles in ''Splendor in the Grass.'' The power of Ms. Allen's performance comes out of understatement. Impeccably coiffed and outfitted, barely moving her tight lips, she projects the full emotional depth of composure under siege.

Like most movies that span many decades, chapters of ''The Notebook'' seem scrunched together. The war, in particular, passes in a flash. It is as a nurse's aide that Allie meets Lon (James Marsden), a dashing, seriously injured soldier from a wealthy Southern family. Once recovered, he courts Allie aggressively and, just when the beautiful couple are on the verge of marrying and becoming the toast of Charleston society, she reads a newspaper article about Noah's architectural restoration and promptly faints. A reunion is in order.

For a movie that might have plunged full-scale into bathos, ''The Notebook'' tries to remain restrained. The camera caresses the lush Southern landscape of blood-red sunsets and flocks of ducks, and Aaron Zigman's romantic score drizzles only a light coating of syrup over the ice cream.

''The Notebook'' is a high-toned cinematic greeting card. It insists on true, mystical, eternal love, till death do us part, and won't have it any other way.

''The Notebook'' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has sexual situations.

THE NOTEBOOK

Directed by Nick Cassavetes; written by Jer emy Leven and adapted by Jan Sardi, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks; director of photography, Robert Fraisse; edited by Alan Heim; music by Aaron Zigman; production designer, Sarah Knowles; produced by Mark Johnson and Lynn Harris; released by New Line Cinema. Running time: 121 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.

WITH: Ryan Gosling (Noah Calhoun), Rachel McAdams (Allie Hamilton), James Garner (Duke), Gena Rowlands (Allie Calhoun), James Marsden (Lon), Kevin Connolly (Fin), Sam Shepard (Frank Calhoun) and Joan Allen (Anne Hamilton).