The movie The Notebook is a wonderfully made movie that describes in detail what it is like not only to live with someone with dementia but also trying to love someone with this disease; even after already loving someone before this awful disease took over their life. For the movie, the person playing Allie could not actually have dementia herself. The Notebook has done a great job of showing what is like trying to live and also love someone with this disease.
As part of the movie shows the two main characters have a young summer romance who have their differences yet still, fall in love with each other in the end. Despite the couple’s differences in their lifestyles and in where and what kind of family they come from, they drift apart and come back together in the end. The Notebook is a very touching and romantic movie, the type to get you locked in and focused on what is happing and what will happen next with the summer love of Noah and Allie.
Dementia is a disease that slowly is deteriorating the brain cells and making the patient die slowly. Dementia, not only for the patient themselves is hard but also for their families and caretakers. Dementia is a very broad disease, there are many different diagnoses between each patient. Each patient diagnosed with this disease can and will experience different problems; according to Dening and Sandilyan, with this disease, many things can happen loss of knowing to pronounce words and how to speak a full sentence, not knowing what certain things are and cannot differentiate between those things.
In most cases when people are diagnosed with this, their privileges such as their driver’s license are taken, because for instance they could forget where they were going, get confused and be gone for hours without their family knowing where they are.
Other causes of dementia are emotional behavior, getting upset at minute things and forgetting how to interact with people. Another thing that Dening and Sandilyan state is that providing care is extremely hard, some families do not want their loved ones in nursing homes they would rather them be at home in their care. The Notebook is about a young couple that has a summer romance, where the two are from completely different sides of society, Allie is from a family of high class, as Noah is from the small town of Seabrook, where the movie is based. In the middle of the movie, Allie has to leave Seabrook, the town she was visiting to return to school when she left, they promised they would write to one another. Noah writing for an entire year without any letters from Allie decided to move on. He started working on the couples dream house.
All the while Allie was thinking she was not getting any letters from Noah because her mother was hiding them from her. Allie decided to move on as well, she soon got proposed to by another man. She was looking for a wedding dress when she saw Noah’s picture in the paper in front of their dream house. At that moment Allie knew she had to go and talk to him, and after seeing him after so many years, she knew he was the one for her. Later she married Noah and they lived in their dream home until they grew old. Allie was told she had dementia but the movie did not state if it was due to Alzheimer’s. They both grew old. Allie was in a nursing home and was to the point where she did not remember who Noah was. Noah, living at the same nursing home, read to Allie every day.
He read a story that Allie herself wrote when she was first diagnosed, a story of their love and the adventures they had had together. While Noah read to her, hoping it would help her memory, Allie asked him sometimes if she had heard the story before. In my own life, my grandfather, that is now eighty has had Alzheimer’s dementia for almost seven years now. I can personally say that it is a terrible disease and every time I get to see him and he smiles at me it makes my entire day. My grandfather, just like Allie has good days and others he will have days where he is rude and aggressive to us. Yes, there are some days where he cannot remember things and those are the hard days. Sometimes like The Notebook, my family thinks that my grandfather is remembering things, even though in the back of our minds we know he does not. The more Noah read to Allie the more he thought she was remembering; he had dinner with Allie, she started remembering things as they were dancing, and then her memories faded and she got aggressive towards Noah. The nurses had to come in and sedate Allie.
The times that grandfather is mean to us and tries to harm us, we have medicine from his doctor to immediately calm him down. For the most part, The Notebook did a fine job on portraying what it is like to love someone with this disease and them not knowing or remembering who you are. The movie shows that at the end Miss Allie does, in fact, remember who Noah is. At the end of the movie, she was depressed that Noah could not come and read to her. The Notebook has shown many people what it is like to live and love someone with this awful disease, without having to go through it themselves. The movie ends with a bittersweet moment, of Noah getting to find Allie, after not seeing her for a few days, in her bedroom laying down not being able to sleep. Allie remembered Noah, asked him if he would come and be with her, where they both lay and pass away in each other’s arms.
Film "Notebook" Made Film. (2021, Dec 18). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/film-notebook-made-film/