OxfordPress.com

Grade: B-

Verdict: As weepies go, this is a perfectly good one.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
Cox News Service

Who could've guessed that the best date movie of the summer so far would feature a pair of septuagenarians?

In "The Notebook," a respectable tearjerker taken from Nicholas Sparks' novel of the same name, James Garner plays an elderly man who lives in a retirement home. Every day, he reads aloud from a notebook to another resident (Gena Rowlands). As she drifts in and out of dementia, it becomes clear the story he's sharing is the story of her life.

Taking its structure from "Fried Green Tomatoes," the movie shifts back and forth between Garner and Rowlands in the present and North Carolina in the 1940s. Poor boy Noah (Ryan Gosling), falls for rich girl Allie (Rachel McAdams) the minute he spots her at a small-town carnival. He forces her to agree to go out with him by dangling off the Ferris wheel and, despite -- or perhaps because of -- their different backgrounds, she falls for him, too.

But there's fallout from her parents (especially Steel Magnolia Joan Allen), who can condone a summer fling but have no intention of these two remaining together. Their intervention, plus Allie's departure for college and a little thing called World War II, lead to a seven-year separation.

A reunion is inevitable, but by the times it comes Allie is engaged to wealthy, good-looking, decent, smart and loving Lonnie ("X-Men's" James Marsden), a wounded soldier she met while volunteering at a veterans hospital. And Noah has come back from the war (very flimsily presented) changed by the slaughter he's witnessed. He's settled into eccentric, shaggy reclusiveness in a formerly decaying antebellum mansion he restored with the help of his supportive dad (Sam Shepard).

There are not many surprises in a movie like this, but there is an aching final twist that owes a little to "Memento." Further, the director is Nick Cassavetes, son of Rowlands and the late independent filmmaker and actor John Cassavetes. The younger Cassavetes made the gloppy "John Q" with Denzel Washington, meaning he's no stranger to commercial projects, but here some of his dad's genes emerge in that the potentially florid plot is simply rendered (if still predictable).

And he's good with actors -- or maybe he picks good actors. Last seen as the meanest girl in "Mean Girls," McAdams gives a breakthrough performance, radiating the sort of sexy freshness you used to see in old Coca-Cola ads. Gosling is good, too, but not as good.