The Notebook (2005) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

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:

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.