USA TODAY International Edition
‘Notebook’ is awful – and I didn’t realize it
It was June 2004. I was a teenager so proud of the mascara stains that trailed my cheeks. They were proof that I didn’t just tear up; I cried so hard at “The Notebook.” I felt invigorated, impassioned. I was alive!
And I was thereafter obsessed with the movie.
The Nicholas Sparks adaptation, a 1940s-set romance starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling as summer lovers with family income discrepancies, would go on to inspire my MySpace wallpaper, top my “favorite movies” list and become required viewing for my confused high-school boyfriends. That was then.
Ahead of the drama’s 15th anniversary on June 25, I decided to revisit the sob story now that I’m a less-hormonal 30. How would I like it?
It turns out, well, I would not. I would not like it at all.
Reader, I finally realized that “The Notebook” is a dangerous dumpster fire. I am embarrassed that I fell for a tale about a stalker who likes the way a girl looks on a carnival ride, and so he spends the rest of his life pining for her, despite not appreciating anything else about her.
How do I despise “The Notebook?” Let me count the ways.
Noah is a total creep
Remember Noah and Allie’s meetnot-so-cute?
He spots her at a carnival where she’s laughing and crashing a bumper car, and instantly decides that she looks gorgeous and “free” and he must have her.
After she politely declines his overtures, he follows her onto a Ferris wheel and proceeds to dangle from the ride by one hand, threatening to slip unless Allie agrees to go on a date with him. She’s forced to say yes.
I’m forced to yell, “This is bull!” at my TV.
Once Allie and Noah get to talking, he insults her
When they finally do get together, Allie opens up about her “strict schedule” of tutoring and music lessons, and Noah makes her feel insecure about not being as “free” as he believed. He convinces her to loosen up, to “learn how to trust,” and to lie on the street with him until they’re both almost hit by a car. She laughs, because, ha, they nearly died.
Ha. Ha. This is garbage that doesn’t show how real, compatible humans fall in love. But the leads are so distractingly handsome I didn’t notice before.
Noah and Allie don’t like each other when they’re not sucking face
Noah and Allie spend a summer making out, yelling at each other for being annoying and learning they have nothing in common. The closest thing they have to a real conversation is an inane chat about how if one if them had been a bird in another life, naturally the other would’ve been, too.
They break up, but don’t mean it. Noah writes Allie letters for 365 days in a row that go unanswered, and in the years that follow, makes no friends and decides that the single thing he should do with his life is restore a house for a girl he can’t stand.
In Allie’s titular notebook (from which this story is told via flashback with Gena Rowlands and James Garner as the elder Allie and Noah), she writes: “They didn’t agree on much. In fact, they rarely agreed on anything.”
Can we all agree that this is unhealthy? And, frankly, just bad storytelling?
Lon should be the hero of the story; instead, he’s the barrier
While Allie is at college, Noah-less, she volunteers as a nurse’s aide and meets Lon (played by James Marsden), a charming man in a full body cast. Once Lon (miraculously) heals, Allie accepts his offer to go dancing without being threatened to do so. They embark on a relationship filled with mutual respect, admiration and fondness for one another. By the way, Lon is rich, which is depicted as a character flaw.
After they get engaged and Allie sees Noah’s photo in the paper, she tells Lon she must take care of something.
“Take your time,” Lon says, comfortingly. “Do whatever you need to do.”
What Allie needs to do is visit Noah, sleep with him and swoon over him. That’s before Noah starts yelling “What do you want?!” at her, and promising a future filled with fights.
“You tell me when I’m being an arrogant (S.O.B.) and I tell you when you’re being a pain in the (butt), which you are 99% of the time!” Noah shouts at her. What an offer of lifelong bliss! Meanwhile, Lon doesn’t raise his voice after learning of Allie’s infidelity. “In spite of everything, I love you,” he says. “But I don’t want to convince my fiancée that she should be with me.”
Now tell me: Why would Allie choose Noah over Lon?
Probably because she confuses security with boredom, and mistakes verbal abuse for passion. Also: She thinks that the fact that she no longer paints is an indicator that she’s unhappy in her relationship. Really, it might be an indicator that she doesn’t actually like to paint.
‘The Notebook’ is bad, but its messaging is worse
Hiding a shallow love story behind attractive actors isn’t itself terribly negligent. But the movie does far worse than that.
It doesn’t help that the film is tainted by news about its novelist. Sparks has been in headlines for sending and then apologizing for past emails that object to “an agenda that strives to make homosexuality open and accepted.”
But even on its own, “The Notebook” teaches impressionable young women that they ought to be pursued by men who see them as prey. (Noah literally says this about Allie: “When I see something that I like, well ... I go crazy for it.”)
I must admit, the geriatric scenes still get me
Full disclosure: I still teared up at the scenes where old Noah insists on reading to old Allie, who has dementia and little chance of remembering him. Darn it, that is romantic!
But as for the rest of the movie, well, I’ll say this: It still did make me feel a lot, like it did the first time. It’s just that this time, I understood my emotions as anger.