Leave it to author Nicholas Sparks — grand master of the moribund, death- themed love story — to employ senility as a romantic foil. Hey, if it worked for terminal cancer in ‘‘A Walk to Remember’’ and dead spouses in ‘‘Message in a Bottle,’’ why not take confusion and chronic forgetfulness for a spin in the Love Bug?

The fact of the matter is, neither of those dreary, nearly unwatchable specimens of casket-clawing sentimentality actually worked. Judging strictly from appearances, there's no obvious reason to assume ‘‘The Notebook’’ — also adapted from a Sparks novel — will fare any better.

Strangely, it does. Maybe it's the soulful direction of Nick Cassavetes (‘‘John Q’’) or the touchingly vulnerable performance delivered by his mother, actress Gena Rowlands, or the sizzling chemistry between the two young leads (Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams). ‘‘The Notebook’’ manages to cleanly pluck our heart-strings where the other two movies only fumbled with the frets.

Looking sad, tired and altogether more enfeebled than he did just three years ago in ‘‘Space Cowboys,’’ James Garner plays an old man with a bad ticker who lives in a retirement home nestled over a picturesque lake somewhere in the South. Every day he visits Allie (Rowlands), a fellow resident who dresses herself in pearls and lipstick but has little recollection of her former life. Nor does she know Garner's character from Adam. Cassavetes doesn't immediately reveal the exact origins of their relationship, but suffice to say, they go back a stretch.

Habitually, the old man reads a story to Allie from a notebook: a hand-crafted fable about a handsome, hard-working kid named Noah (Gosling from ‘‘Murder by Numbers’’) who falls in love with a privileged Southern princess named, you guessed it, Allie (McAdams from ‘‘Mean Girls’’) during one storybook summer in the days before World War II.

Allie loves Noah's daring and determination. Noah helps Allie discover her inner free spirit. They ride on ferris wheels. They smear each other with ice cream. They defy her bigoted, class- fixated parents (Joan Allen and David Thornton).

Ultimately, war and parental meddling tear them apart. Years later, they meet again — Noah, an emotionally paralyzed bachelor who lives in a big, empty manor; Allie, a radiant belle with a witty, dashing fiancé (James Marsden from ‘‘X-Men’’).

Cassavetes keeps the bow wrapped — loosely — on Garner's identity, leaving us to wonder if he's Noah or the fiancé. As surprise endings go, it's hardly ‘‘The Sixth Sense,’’ and the young actor who does turn out to be Garner's younger version couldn't look less like him. Where ‘‘The Notebook’’ does succeed is in its passionate endorsement of romantic destiny and Cassavetes’ knack for visual poetry. The movie is awash in peach-colored sunsets and dreamlike encounters with water fowl.