At the end of my Moulin Rouge! review, I said that I likely would have enjoyed The Notebook more than Moulin Rouge!. To test out this theory, I borrowed The Notebook, and made the time to watch it. Romance for its own sake is not really my genre (as I’m more used to love stories being embedded in some other genre), but it seemed worth a shot to see if I was movie savvy enough to enjoy such a movie if it was well executed.
To that point, it fell somewhat short of enjoyable, but kept itself above the threshold of painful. For more, you’ll have to see my full review after the jump.
When it comes to love stories, I tend to like those that aren’t narratively rushed, primarily as I dislike “love at first sight” kinds of love stories, and that tends to be the narrative shorthand if you want to have a love story in an overcrowded plot. So, the idea of a movie totally dedicated to telling a love story was not immediately repulsive – if anything, it had the potential to do it better than many other movies.
Unfortunately, The Notebook does rely on the “love at first sight” cliché and follows up with “teenagers find true love after three months”, and, as such, the narrative thrust of this movie really fell flat for me. This is the stuff of love story mediocrity, and made the better part of this movie feel shallow as a result. The narrative of Duke and Allie in the nursing home was better, and, in a way, redeemed much of this movie, but this lacked the central focus of the film, and so too felt crowded in its narrative, and unable to deliver.
The other potential success of this movie was the love triangle between Allie, Noah, and Lon. Unfortunately, The Notebook failed to develop the critical part of a love triangle that makes it interesting: a relationship between each pair of characters. Noah and Lon had no connection whatsoever, making this more of a love “angle” at best, and a tug-of-war at worst. When I look at the architypes of Noah and Lon, they are effectively the same – they both live by absolutes and will have nothing but all of Allie’s love for themselves. In this way, neither seemed a good life partner. The turning point for me was, after sleeping with Noah, he basically said, “if you go back to Lon, it’s over between us” and after telling Lon about her tryst, he said, “I guess I’ll either have to shoot him, beat him up, or leave you”. Both of these declarations of absolute all-or-nothing attitudes seem like they would be damaging in the long run, especially in the face of a woman that has an emotional attachment to another.
With Duke and Allie, another narrative appears, and that is one that was more powerful. Here, we have a man who continues to love his partner, even though that love is not returned. This story is good tragedy, but I can’t help but see that it had potential to carry this movie, to be even better.
I don’t usually like to write about how I might “fix” a movie, but there was one potentiality that would have really worked for me (though I can see how it would have just as easily failed others): Suppose everything was exactly the same, except that Duke was Lon (instead of Noah). Then, the movie takes on a whole new meaning, and forces one to question that “love at first sight”. Now it’s not a cliched shorthand, but a harsh look at what it means to discard one lover for another and projects such as complicated, rather than the overly-simplistic view of true love vs who you’re settling for.
Overall, The Notebook manages to only pull off a mediocre love story. I’ve definitely seen better, even embedded in other narratives, which made me a little disappointed when I thought about it. In closing, I would give The Notebook two and a half lover’s quarrels – interesting, but ultimately failing to live up to its potential. Also, if my review didn’t make it obvious, I did like The Notebook more than Moulin Rouge! – quite a bit more, in fact.