Sweeping romance directed by Nick Cassavetes, starring Gena Rowlands, James Garner, Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling. Tearjerkers don\'t come better than this! Set in a small coastal town in the American South in the 1940s, and in the present day. The films opens as an elderly man reads a love story to a woman in a nursing home, from an old notebook full of sentimental scribblings about a passionate young couple whose fledgling affair is smothered almost before it has begun. Based on the novel of the same name by Nicholas Sparks