¶ … Notebook is a decidedly fantastic work of cinema. It depicts love and its power in a most fantastic way, and it presents dementia (or Alzheimer's disease) in a most fantastic way. Still, due to its subject matter and its mythic, ethereal approach to it, it actually is able to produce an emotional reaction from its audience. Exactly what sort to emotion it evokes is largely dependent on the nature of that audience. However, in order to produce its desired effect, it takes a fair amount of license with the way that dementia is portrayed in this movie -- which is worthy of deconstructing. The film is narrated by an older gentleman and an older woman named Allie who are in a nursing home. The former is narrating a love story to the latter which actually takes place in the 1940's and depicts the interaction of an adolescent boy, Noah, and his teenage lover, Allie. The pair fall in love with one another during a picturesque summer and desire to spend the rest of their lives together until Allie's mom (motivated by the fact that she and her daughter are wealthy whereas Noah is all but destitute) forbids her from seeing him. Allie and her family leave the area and Noah, despondent over Allie's mother's successful attempts of hiding his letters to her, enlists in World War II. In the...

This fact becomes critical as in the tale the elderly gentlemen is narrating Allie finds another lover -- a soldier injured during World War II. It becomes clear that the Allie of the present in the young woman in the past, but the viewer does not know if the man reading the story to her is Noah or the soldier Allie helped recover from his injuries. It is gradually revealed that Allie, who was engaged to the soldier, reencountered Noah who purchased a house and fixed it to the specifications he claimed to Allie that he would when they were teenagers eventually ends up with Noah, which simply leaves the fact that their love is now hindered by dementia. The movie finishes with the pair dying in bed together (Cassavetes, 2004).
There are many ways in which the crux of this film actually revolves around the way that dementia is portrayed in this film. There were some accuracies in the movie, such as the fact initially, during the telling of the older gentleman's tale, Allie repeatedly asks the same question (how will the story end). It seems as though she does not remember or cannot process the patient gentleman's same response to these questions. This aspect of dementia is fairly accurate, as dementia…