My favourite film aged 12: The Notebook
Continuing our series revisiting childhood movie passions, we look at a romance that could’ve been schlock, if not for Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling’s chemistry
F
lash back to the summer of 2007: Spider-Man 3 was in theatres. Two of the top five most viewed YouTube videos were by the band My Chemical Romance. And The Notebook, a movie starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling as star-crossed teenage lovers who reconnect as adults, was three years old. The famous re-enactment of the film’s climactic lift-and-kiss at the MTV movie awards by its stars, then a real-life couple, was two years old. I was 13 years old and, true to sheltered oldest child form, didn’t know about any of this. And so one sleepover night in my friend’s basement, I faced at least three aghast faces: “You haven’t seen The Notebook?!?”
The Notebook probably has fans outside my demographic – it’s an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks romance novel, a book/author/genre marketed to middle-aged women – but for girls in middle school (or, at least, my middle school in suburban Ohio) between 2004 and 2008 or so, it was a foundational text. It was the romantic movie of choice, a portal into couple-shipping YouTube and, later, Tumblr holes, a benchmark for years of unrealistic dating expectations. You wanted to know what sex was “supposed” to look and sound like AND tell everyone you bawled at the profound idea of love transcending old age? You watched The Notebook.
For those who haven’t seen it, The Notebook follows 17-year-old Allie (McAdams) as she moves to a small South Carolina town for the summer and meets Noah (Gosling), a construction worker fond of Walt Whitman and bold gestures, such as threatening to jump off a ferris wheel to get Allie to go out with him. They fall in love, then break up (she’s rich, he’s not; her parents disapprove) and, separately, serve in the second world war . He pines for her; she gets engaged to handsome, preternaturally forgiving solider played by James Marsden. They reconnect, and things are complicated. The story is narrated by the older Noah, who reads from a notebook composed by Allie as a totem to bring her back from the dementia eclipsing her memories.
This twist – Noah and Allie have together composed an epic love story that she mostly can’t remember – landed like a gut punch for us as emotionally chaotic seventh-graders who had imagined our sunset years approximately zero times. All of us watching that summer night ended the movie in tears, which was a cathartic bonding experience on its own. But at 13, on the cusp of high school but seemingly, for me, light-years away from sneaking out with a boy, the main draw was the heat between McAdams and Gosling. Their chemistry was palpable and hungry with a sharp, heady sting. (It is transparent they were falling in love off-screen.) These two were brain-meltingly hot, an unknowing factory of aspirational summer love gifs.
Importantly for me then, the film hinges on one pivotal, rain-soaked scene in which Allie asks Noah why he never wrote her when they broke up. (Actually, he wrote her 365 letters! He wrote her every day for a year!). He proclaims, famously: “It wasn’t over … it STILL isn’t over.” At the time, I had no older friends or siblings, no health class, just the steamy handprint from Titanic, so I was thrilled when they kiss, and he pushes her against a wall, and carries her up the stairs, and strips off her soaked clothes … and the camera keeps rolling. As far as movies go, The Notebook has a rather tame sex scene – all soft lighting, swelling music, delicate shots that don’t reveal much, nudity-wise. The camera mostly lingers on McAdams’ face as she has a transcendent time (again, disappointingly high expectations were set by this movie). The whole scene is only about 4.5 minutes long, but at 13 this felt like an eternity, and a guidebook. Oh, adulthood has this? You lose your senses and can’t take your hands off someone? Good to know!
Importantly for me then, the film hinges on one pivotal, rain-soaked scene in which Allie asks Noah why he never wrote her when they broke up. (Actually, he wrote her 365 letters! He wrote her every day for a year!). He proclaims, famously: “It wasn’t over … it STILL isn’t over.” At the time, I had no older friends or siblings, no health class, just the steamy handprint from Titanic, so I was thrilled when they kiss, and he pushes her against a wall, and carries her up the stairs, and strips off her soaked clothes … and the camera keeps rolling. As far as movies go, The Notebook has a rather tame sex scene – all soft lighting, swelling music, delicate shots that don’t reveal much, nudity-wise. The camera mostly lingers on McAdams’ face as she has a transcendent time (again, disappointingly high expectations were set by this movie). The whole scene is only about 4.5 minutes long, but at 13 this felt like an eternity, and a guidebook. Oh, adulthood has this? You lose your senses and can’t take your hands off someone? Good to know!
Rewatching The Notebook for the first time in years, it’s clear, of course, how silly it was to base my idea of maturity on this movie, and also how stellar McAdams and Gosling’s performances remain. The Notebook could have been a solid B-movie romance (see: every other Nicholas Sparks adaptation), but the lead performances power it far higher than its melodramatic parts. It is almost thrilling – and the main draw for me now – to watch two ascendant, now-acclaimed actors make the hairpin turns of its dialogue somewhat convincing. The idea of actually fighting this way? Laughable. But that look Noah gives Allie when he asks: “Goddammit, what do you WANT?” Yeah, that still hits.
A couple of weeks ago, before this series assignment, I rewatched The Notebook on instinct. It felt good during, you know, ALL THIS, to return to an old favourite, to slip along the slick grooves of worn emotions. To retrace the lines of this familiar ride, even if I now find many of them horribly cheesy, and my feelings cringingly earnest. How to think of it now? I defer to Gosling, who said in that fateful year, 2007: “God bless The Notebook. It introduced me to one of the great loves of my life.” I would not classify The Notebook as one of my great loves, but still: god bless this movie, flawed textbook that it was, for introducing me to a new vision of the adult future, and for saying: Hang on. It’s a bumpy ride of feelings ahead but one day, you’ll appreciate them.
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