A Better Ending for Sparks' The Notebook

            I put in the Netflix DVD of The Notebook, which I'd put in my queue after hearing Dana and Karl mention it on recommended movies.  I watched it more or less while peeling vegetables and roasting eggplant.

          We're made to suspect that the Gena Rowland-looking woman with Alzheimer's (played by Gena Rowland) is Allie grown older, so the question is who is the man called "Duke." who's faithfully coming to read to her every day from The Notebook.  Is it Noah, the man who won her heart by harassing her on the ferris wheel at the opening of the movie and later wrote her 365 letters she never saw, or is it Lon, the man she became engaged to and also loved but who didn't make her feel the way Noah made her feel?  We go from seeing the Rowland-Duke (James Gardner) couple to returning to the past for the various stages of Allie's love life.  We also see another woman in the arms of Noah, who treats her with coolness and never tries to comfort her when she feels unloved.  This is Martha Shaw.  There's a scene in which Martha and Allie meet and then Martha says goodbye to Noah, who stands there showing no emotion and not even suggesting, "You'll meet a wonderful guy who will love you."  There's also a scene in which Allie tells her fiance Lon Hammond that she loves him, but she's still in love with Noah.  Lon still loves her and wants to marry her.  Then, as the music swells,  we see Allie going back to Lon and the house he built for her.

            So Duke says that he's Noah, and Gena Rowlands is Allie, but we know it's not true.  At first we suspect that Noah is Lon replacing the memory Allie lost of their marriage with the marriage Allie sacrificed when she married Lon instead of Noah.  Even though she didn't wind up with Noah in reality, she can wind up remembering that she did.

            That's not bad.

            But the truth is that Gena Rowland is Martha, and Duke is Lon.  They wound up together after being rejected by their first love interests, and his loyalty to her as she goes deeper into dementia is the proof of the enduring depth, height,bredth of their love, which would never have been had Allie married Lon and Noah married Martha.  

As for Allie and Noah, we suspect that they were disappointed, disillusioned, and divorced after five years of marriage.