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THEN AND NOW
Rachel McAdams as Allie...
the notebook
LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED, SANG THE BEATLES TOWARDS THE END OF THE SIXTIES. TWENTY YEARS BEFORE THAT, THE CHARACTERS IN THE NOTEBOOK BELIEVED TOTALLY IN THE CONCEPT - AND 40 YEARS LATER, IT FINALLY
CAME TRUE. FLETCHER REID REPORTS ON A FILM IN
WHICH, IN THE WORDS
OF ANOTHER SONG, THE
FUNDAMENTAL THINGS APPLY…
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In a movie world dominated by superheroes and fantasy, by action and horror, love stories have been rather pushed into the background of late. This was something that director Nick Cassavetes was determined to change with The Notebook, a film adapted from the best-selling novel by Nicholas Sparks.
...Gena Rowlands as the older Allie and James Garner as ‘Duke’ |
“The interesting thing about the books Nicholas Sparks writes is that they’re these lush romances about enduring love,” says Cassavetes, “and yet there’s always a strong element of tragedy and loss.” The Notebook - which stars Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams in the part of the story set in South Carolina in the forties, and James Garner and Gena Rowlands, in the part set in the present - has both. It is the story of a relationship that was never meant to be, but which simply would not go away.
It tells the story of Noah Calhoun (Gosling) and Allie Hamilton (McAdams) who, in the classic tradition of doomed love stories, come so much from different sides of the tracks that the odds against them meeting are overwhelming. She is a debutante descended from generations of Southern aristocracy; he is a mill worker who has hardly ever left the imaginary coastal town of Seabrook, North Carolina. They meet one summer in the forties, and they fall head over heels in love when Noah first sees Allie riding the bumper cars at the local carnival.
“She’s really getting thrown around, and she’s just laughing her head off,” says Gosling. “Noah and his buddies aren’t used to seeing somebody of her class in a situation like that – free and unencumbered by anything she’s supposed to be. And that’s incredibly attractive to him.”
Allie’s mother, Anne (Joan Allen), initially tries to pull the couple apart, but in the end lets the relationship be, confident that, when Allie goes to college at the end of summer, it will wither and die of its own accord. The obstacles become even greater when Noah goes off to war in Europe, and Allie meets up with the perfect husband, Lon (James Marsden), a wounded soldier from a background similar to her own whom she is nursing as a volunteer in a GI hospital. In due course, Allie agrees to marry Lon. But the bond with Noah refuses to go away, re-emerging in startling form some 60 years later, when an elderly man called Duke (James Garner, playing the man Noah has become) reads from a diary to the now old Allie (Rowlands), who is in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s disease.
“Duke is still madly in love with Allie,” says Garner. “And, as she becomes more removed from reality, he keeps reading to her. Every once in a while, she comes out of her Alzheimer’s and remembers, which the doctors say you can’t do, of course … but she does. He brings her back, even it’s only for a few minutes.”
“I think the most important thing is the enduring nature of love,” says Sam Shepard, who plays Noah’s father, Frank. “It’s something I think that we don’t really value much. Love is exterminated all the time; it’s turned over; it’s discarded; it’s thrown away. But I think there are still possibilities of love that endures not only through our time, but beyond that. It’s this enduring possibility, not just a temporary fling, but something that goes for a long, long time, and has reverberations down through the generations, too. That’s important.”
The film was shot in and around Charleston, South Carolina, one of the jewels of the Old South, many of whose familiar values permeate the film. But there was a deeper significance to setting the film in the South, as Gosling discovered when he first started talking about his role with director Cassavetes.
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