MAJOR SPOILERS HERE!!!!!
I admit that what I found touching was the part about them in their old age. Mainly the fact that he would repeatedly read their story to his wife in order to spend just 5 minutes with her, knowing full well that when the 5 minutes were up he was going to have his heart ripped out when she forgot again. To him it was worth all that effort and all that pain, just to have another 5 minutes with the woman he loved. And although it's hard to say what's going on in the mind of someone with Alzheimer's, it is evident that she loved those moments, as well. And we do see written in the book that it was his wife that wrote something like, "read this to me and I will come back to you", showing that it was her desire that he do so. I thought that was an important detail.
Approaching Infinity said:
My impression of that movie was: "Jesus, this guy's a self-pitying,
self-important, manipulative robot!" Here's how I remember the plot:
Guy meets girl and, although she didn't show interest in him at first,
woos her with his impulsiveness and upfront-ness about his amorous
intentions. They have a summer relationship, but she eventually moves
away or something. The guy then obsesses about her for years, while she
forgets about him. He buys the run-down house where they slept together
for the first time and makes it perfect, just the way she imagined.
The girl marries another guy, and then finds out that the obsessed guy
has bought and renovated the mansion. Now she's conflicted. "Man, this
guy really loves me! More than my husband, even!" [spoilers follow:] We
find out that the narrator telling the story is in fact the guy, and
that they are now old. The woman became his wife and now has Alzheimer's.
The man reads from 'the notebook' containing their story to
her, so that when they get to the end, she remembers, and they have 5
more minutes together, until she forgets again.
The movie is supposed to be about "love that never dies", and while
there are some really sweet and cute moments, I just couldn't but think
it was a movie more about obsession and self-pitying than about Love.
It's also interesting that she had even forgotten about the guy, and then
developed Alzheimer's after getting together with him. That says something
both about her true feelings for him (would anyone really forget their soul mate?)
and the nature of their relationship.
I have to agree with you on the self-pitying, obsessive part - he was definitely that - but I didn't see him as manipulative. And there are a couple of things in your plot summary that I interpreted differently, and a couple of important details are missing that lend to that different interpretation.
Firstly, she didn't just move away or something. Her parents decided to leave, solely to force the two of them apart. After having been made aware that her parents disapproved of him, and their relationship, they both had very emotional, confused reactions and said hurtful things that they didn't really mean. The next day she woke up to find out her family was leaving, and so they never got to speak to each other again and express how they truly felt. That constituted a major lack of closure to what they both felt was a "true love" relationship.
The other thing is that he wrote her a letter every day for a whole year telling her how he really felt, but her mother intercepted them all so she never got to read them. And we know that her forgetting about him didn't just happen, just like that. It was a long, painful process. We know this because when she confronts her mother about the letters, she says something like, "You let me go through all that pain, crying my heart out every day, knowing that he had written all those letters?", or something to that effect - more lack of closure. She only
forced herself to forget about him because she thought he had done the same - but he hadn't. And they did mention, that at the moment her fiancee proposed to her, she thought about this guy. So I don't think she had really forgotten about him.
Basically, my feeling was that these two had found a real love that included accepting each other entirely, differences and all, and had it ripped away from them by the manipulations of the girls mother. And although I agree that the guy became obsessive and self-pitying, it was entirely due to his true love for this girl.
Heimdallr said:
Shortly before Rachel McAdams is to marry, she sees a picture of her former flame Ryan Gosling in the paper and decides to go see him. And, they end up sleeping together. Not very nice of her, and really what does it say about her? Cheating on your fiance isn't my idea of romance.
The two protagonists above were pretty two-dimensional to me. Gosling has a fling and basically goes into deep depression about it for years afterward. He builds up a fantasy world based on essentially a one-night stand. Um, weird creepy guy that can't get over a fling? Who doesn't want that? The whole love story just seemed built on cliches and banalities. It deals with every minor detail of their courtship and then ends abruptly and never deals with anything that happened in the 60+ years that followed, including their actual LIVES TOGETHER, or the BIRTH OF THEIR CHILDREN, or the BIRTH OF THEIR GRANDCHILDREN.
That may have been interesting, but instead we get a story about two people who seem to have no awareness of anything other than what they feel at any particular moment.
I agree with your point about cheating on your fiancee, but again I feel there are some particular reasons why it happened that way. She had forced herself to accept that the man she was deeply in love with had just forgotten about her, so she TRIED to put him out of her mind. But seeing him in the picture with the house made her question whether that is what really happened. That's what I think it was meant to imply. I can see how it might be hard to marry someone knowing that you love someone else, and having recently become aware that they may still love you, after all.
So she felt she had to put things straight in her mind before giving herself to another man. The timing was bad (after the proposal but before the wedding) but she had no control over that. It was when she went to see him that she found out about the letters he had written. That was the detail that led to her sleeping with him - finding out that he had loved her all along. That was the wrong thing to do, the wrong way to deal with the situation, but that is the overwhelming romantic detail.
And there is one more detail that I think is important.
Approaching Infinity said:
He buys the run-down house where they slept together
for the first time and makes it perfect, just the way she imagined.
Heimdallr said:
Gosling has a fling and basically goes into deep depression about it for years afterward. He builds up a fantasy world based on essentially a one-night stand. Um, weird creepy guy that can't get over a fling?
They didn't sleep together that night in the mansion. They were going to, but then she started questioning things, like how he was able to just jump right into it while she was very nervous and unsure. And although he was visibly frustrated by the situation, he behaved as a gentleman telling her that they didn't have to do it if she didn't want to (maybe because he really loved her). At that moment his buddy came rushing in telling them that her parents had the police searching everywhere for her, thus interrupting the whole thing. It was not a one-night stand, it was a summer-long relationship that was not influenced by sex.
Anyway, I do see your points on a couple of things, but I think those missing details made it a different story for me.
So, do you think we have included enough detail to have adequately spoiled this movie for anyone? :D
