The Notebook

For the shredder: Only old coots could love The Notebook

By Anthony Allison

"Oh, I do wish I could figure out the end of this story," moans Gena Rowlands to James Garner. He's reading her the tale of star-crossed lovers--mill worker Ryan Gosling and society gal Rachel McAdams--whose rural North Carolina romance, in the summer 1940, was cruelly curtailed by her disapproving parents (bitchy Joan Allen, mustache-twirling David Thornton), only to be revived as she was about to marry the Other Man (James Marsden).

By this point in The Notebook, Nick Cassavetes' syrupy film of Nicholas Sparks' 1996 novel, Gena is the only person within a 100-mile radius who hasn't twigged how this formulaic saga ends. But soon she miraculously emerges from the fog of senile dementia, as dozens of gullible seniors reach for the Kleenex. Jan Sardi and Jeremy Leven's screenplay aims to mix the sentiment of It's a Wonderful Life with On Golden Pond's nostalgic glow. But as anyone who endured the previous Sparks pics (A Walk to Remember, Message in a Bottle) can guess, this manipulative tripe, with its chemistry-challenged young leads, doesn't even come close.