The Notebook arrived in 2004 as an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel, and it has outlasted nearly everything else released that summer. It grossed $118.3 million against a $29 million budget. New Line Cinema put it in theaters on June 25, 2004, after a world premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival on May 20. Critics were mixed. Audiences were not.
Trailer, via eOnefilms.
Noah Calhoun and the Carnival in Seabrook Island
Nick Cassavetes directs from a screenplay by Jeremy Leven and Jan Sardi, working off Sparks’ 1996 book. The frame is a nursing home. An elderly man named Duke reads aloud from a notebook to a woman with Alzheimer’s. The story he reads opens in 1940 at a carnival in Seabrook Island, South Carolina.
Lumber mill worker Noah Calhoun sees 17-year-old heiress Allison “Allie” Hamilton and falls for her on sight. He pursues. She yields. Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams play them, and the movie lives or dies on whether you believe the two of them.
This is where The Notebook is strongest and where it is most dishonest with itself. The courtship is charming. The class divide is sketched with a heavy hand. Allie’s mother Anne, played by Joan Allen, decides working-class Noah is not good enough and forbids the match. Noah overhears. He tells Allie he sees no future. She breaks up with him and regrets it within the hour.
A Summer That Ends at Windsor Plantation
Before the split, Noah takes Allie to Windsor Plantation and describes his dream of repairing the abandoned house. They try to have sex. It is awkward. Neither is sure what to do, and a nervous Allie cannot stop talking. Their friend Fin interrupts to say Allie’s parents have called the police.
That scene is the movie’s best argument for itself. It is unglamorous and specific. Most of the film is neither.
Anne announces the family is returning to Charleston the next morning. Allie rushes to the lumber mill to apologize. Noah is away. She asks Fin to tell him she loves him. Noah races to her house when the message arrives. She is already gone.
The Letters Anne Hamilton Intercepts
Noah writes to Allie every day for a year. Anne intercepts the letters. That single act of interference drives seven years of separation, and the film treats it as a plot device rather than a wound.
Then the US enters World War II. Noah and Fin enlist and fight in the Battle of the Bulge. Fin is killed. Allie nurses soldiers in a hospital and meets wounded Captain Lon Hammond, played by James Marsden.
Seven years after the summer at Seabrook Island, Noah and Allie reunite. The film wants that reunion to feel inevitable. It feels scheduled.
| Element | The Notebook (2004) |
|---|---|
| Director | Nick Cassavetes |
| Screenwriters | Jeremy Leven, Jan Sardi |
| Source novel | Nicholas Sparks, 1996 |
| Runtime | 123 minutes |
| Budget | $29 million |
| Box office | $118.3 million |
| Young leads | Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams |
| Older leads | James Garner, Gena Rowlands |
| Release date | June 25, 2004 |
| Distributor | New Line Cinema |
Ryan Gosling Moves to Charleston
The casting story is more interesting than most of the movie. Cassavetes wanted someone unknown and “not handsome” for Noah. He picked Gosling. Hayden Christensen had been considered. Gosling was baffled. “I read [the script] and I thought, ‘He’s crazy. I couldn’t be more wrong for this movie,'” he said.
He came around. “It gave me an opportunity to play a character over a period of time – from 1940 to 1946 – that was quite profound and formative,” Gosling said. He moved to Charleston for two months before filming, rowed the Ashley River and made furniture.
James Garner, approached for the older Noah, asked his agent whether the script was for a television film. He read it again and decided it had universal appeal.
The Allie search was national. Jessica Biel, Britney Spears, Jaime King, Kate Beckinsale, Kate Bosworth, Amy Adams, Mandy Moore, Scarlett Johansson, Claire Danes, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ashley Judd and Reese Witherspoon were among those who auditioned or were considered. The choice came down to Spears and McAdams. McAdams won.
Cassavetes was direct about why. “When Rachel McAdams came in and read, it was apparent that she was the one. She and Ryan had great chemistry between them,” he said. McAdams read the script and auditioned two days later. “I thought it would be a dream to be able to do it,” she said. Gosling went further: “I think that it’s pretty fair to say that we probably wouldn’t have made the film if we hadn’t found Rachel… Really, Allie drives the movie. It’s her movie and we’re in it.”
He is right, and that is the film’s problem as much as its strength.
Gena Rowlands Wins at the Satellite Awards
The Notebook collected awards that tell you what it is. Gosling and McAdams won Best Kiss at the 2005 MTV Movie Awards. At the 11th Screen Actors Guild Awards, Garner was nominated for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role.
Gena Rowlands, the director’s mother, won Best Supporting Actress – Drama at the 9th Golden Satellite Awards for playing older Allie. The recognition went to the frame story, not the romance.
An extended version premiered on ABC Family on November 11, 2012, with deleted scenes added back into the original storyline.
What The Notebook Gets Wrong
The film is 123 minutes and feels longer. The present-day nursing home material carries weight the 1940s material cannot. Garner and Rowlands play the cost of a life together. Gosling and McAdams play the beginning of one, and the movie keeps cutting away from them just as they get interesting.
The dialogue leans on declaration. Characters announce their feelings because the screenplay does not trust a look to do it. The class conflict resolves itself without anyone changing. Anne’s interference is never reckoned with. Fin dies offscreen in a war the film barely stages.
What survives is the awkwardness at Windsor Plantation, the rowboat on the Ashley, and the notebook itself as a device. A man reading to a woman who does not remember him is a better idea than anything built around it.
Why The Notebook Still Has a Hold
The Notebook became a sleeper hit and then a cult classic, and the gap between those two things matters. A sleeper hit is a business outcome. A cult classic is an audience decision, made years later, often by people who were not in theaters in 2004.
The film earns that second status through the frame, not the flashback. Duke reading aloud to a patient who may not know him is the only part of this movie that asks a real question: what is love worth when the person you love cannot hold onto it?
The 1940s romance answers an easier one. Will the rich girl choose the poor boy? Of course she will.
That is why the critical score landed where it did. The Notebook is not a bad film. It is a film with one great idea and 100 minutes of competent filler around it. The performances are better than the material. McAdams carries it, as Gosling said. Garner and Rowlands give it a floor.
Worth watching once. Worth rewatching for the last twenty minutes, which are the only twenty minutes that earn the reputation.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
