The Notebook Review

The famous shot is the one in the rain, and it earns its place: Rachel McAdams and Gosling screaming at each other on a jetty in a downpour, faces wrecked, before the argument turns. Robert Fraisse photographs 1940s South Carolina as warm brown light and standing water, and the ruined plantation house that Noah rebuilds board by board is a concrete image for a man refusing to move on. What surrounds it is a machine. The plot runs on a mother who hides letters, a rival fiance who exists only to be decent and then dropped, and a war that arrives to fill a reel.

The framing device, James Garner reading aloud to Gena Rowlands in a nursing home, is where the film is quietly best, because Garner plays patience rather than devotion and Rowlands can turn confusion on and off inside a single take. The dialogue is the weak seam. Whole lines are written to be quoted rather than spoken, and the actors have to push hard to get them across, McAdams hardest of all. Nick Cassavetes stages the swans, the candlelit house and the last hospital corridor with far more conviction than the screenplay has earned from him.