The Notebook is adapted from a best-selling novel by Nicholas
Sparks, who is a member of a very exclusive club - the society of men
who write timeless best-selling romantic novels for women. Since their
membership roster is part of the vast body of erudition outside my
areas of knowledge, the only other club member I can name is Robert
James Waller, the guy who wrote The Bridges of Madison County. Those
two men have some things in common, perhaps the most important of
which is that they both came from outside the world of letters when
they became novelists. Professor Waller taught applied mathematics and
economic theory for a couple of decades before his first mass market
book was published, and he was 53 years old when The Bridges of
Madison Country became a publishing phenomenon.
Nicholas Sparks had a business/finance degree and was working as a
pharmaceutical sales rep when The Notebook broke through, although he
had always wanted to be a writer and had written a novel when he was
still a 19-year-old undergraduate at Notre Dame.
The Notebook qualifies as an official chick-flick by our objective
definition: the score assigned by female voters (8.7) is a full point
higher than the score from male voters (7.7). Therefore, instead of
telling you how I feel about this movie, I think I can sum up its
appeal with the following information. I have a nineteen year old
daughter and a fourteen year old niece. The former's favorite movie
was Titanic. The latter's is The Notebook. My niece and her friends
watch The Notebook again and again, and they are still talking about
it now, although it has been gone from theaters for more than a year,
and was released on DVD five months ago. It is the ultimate film for
eighth grade white girls, a Degas painting for the new millennium.
This chart tells the story:
age |
Male |
Female |
below 18 |
8.4 |
9.2 |
18-29 |
7.6 |
8.8 |
30-49 |
7.6 |
8.2 |
above 49 |
7.8 |
8.3 |
Yes, it is a chick-flick, but boys actually like the movie, and men
don't hate it at all. I watched it without fast forwarding, and the lowest score on the chart
above, 7.6, is still in
classic territory. The 9.2 is off the charts, and that score has
actually been adjusted downward through some arithmetical finagling.
The unadjusted average of these votes is 9.5! IMDb doesn't publish Top
Ten lists by demographic sub-group, but this is probably the most
popular film of all time among young girls. Amelie is rated only 8.9
by the same group.
And it made money. A lot of money.
Publishers have always known that there is a tremendous commercial
market for "women's books." The Bridges of Madison County is the
best-selling novel of all time, and Sparks's books are also
phenomenally popular, with sales of about fifty million copies to
date. Film producers also know that there is a massive latent market
for "women's movies" - as Titanic and My Big Fat Greek Wedding have
demonstrated - but that market tends to stay dormant because film
moguls don't really know how to tap into that well as effectively as book
publishers do. Most films continue to be made by and for men. This was one of the
successes. The film version of
The Notebook debuted to tepid critical response (49% positive reviews)
and a lukewarm opening weekend ($13 million), but it connected with
female viewers. Their word-of-mouth network drove it along the same
kind of path that Greek Wedding blazed, and The Notebook consistently
piled on the ticket sales week after week until it had become a major
commercial success ($81 million). The total-to-opening ratio of
six-to-one is impressive since most films finish in the threes, but
even that is still a far cry from the eighty-to-one racked up by Greek
Wedding and the twenty-to-one achieved by Titanic. Hell, I'm still
trying to figure out why The Notebook grossed only
eighty million, given that every young teen girl loves it and that so
many women of all ages have read the book.
The plot is uncomplicated. An old man is in a rest home. Each day
he reads a romantic story to an old woman with senile dementia. As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that the story is their
own, and that he is reading it in the hope that it will stir her
memories of herself. The doctors tell him that senile dementia is
irreversible, but that point doesn't seem to be important to him. In
his view, he has nothing to lose and everything to gain. Even if he
fails completely he is still getting a chance to re-live the greatest
moments of his life with the woman he shared them with, and that alone
gives him pleasure. And there is always that hope ...
Although there are romantic moments in both time periods, most of
the action takes place in the flashbacks, which are pictorializations
of the story he is reading from his notebook. Nick Cassavetes
directed, and the older version of the woman is played by Nick's own
mother, Gena Rolands.
The Notebook has a very good chance to make the IMDb all-time Top
250 some day. It fact, it probably should be there now! The Hustler is
rated #162, although it is rated 7.9 with 9000 votes, while The
Notebook is rated 7.9 with 14000 votes! IMDb does not explain
all of its statistical modeling in depth, but they say that the top
250 list is based solely on votes from "regular voters." The Notebook
is rated only 7.0 by their "top 1000" voters. (I wonder how many women
are on that prestigious list. I wonder how many in that group have
even seen a woman up close.) Despite the lack of enthusiasm from
critics, and the IMDb "top 1000 voters," we can look back on it
objectively, a year and a half after its release, and see clearly that
it has become a classic of the "women's movie" genre.
The nudity below is from the deleted scenes. Given the target
audience for the film, the investors obviously could not risk an
R-rating.
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