Suzanne’s Diary for
Nicholas costars real-life couple Christina Applegate and Jonathon Schaech,
and explores parallels between the lives of its in-bloom characters, teasing
things up into a lucky-to-have-loved chorus.
book editor Kate Wilkinson (Kathleen Rose Perkins) is a chronic workaholic who
thinks she’s finally found the perfect man in the form of author Matt Harrison
(Schaech). But on one of the most important nights of their relationship, Matt
suddenly ends their affair without explanation. (They’re not in the middle of a
war, alas, so this small nod to Graham Greene goes mostly un-highlighted.) Soon
after, a devastated Kate receives a package from Matt containing a diary
written by his wife Suzanne (Applegate) to their unborn son. Reading it, Kate
gets drawn into Suzanne’s tender, stirring story — about a Martha’s Vineyard marriage
between a housepainter who dreams of being a writer and a female doctor who
yearns to be a mother but it hamstrung by a serious heart condition. Slowly but
surely, Kate sees certain connections to her own life.
is that it’s reductionist emotional pabulum — cookie-cutter fare (except maybe
with better-looking people) made only to conform to expectation and give us a
mirror image of our own wishes and desires that we’re too lazy to act upon. On
this charge, Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas,
broadcast on CBS two springs ago, is essentially guilty. Yet by the same token,
it’s also decently rendered and acted, a sort of down-market version of The Notebook, if you will. Director
Richard Friedenberg is a veteran of this type of material, and accordingly
pulls out all the stops. There isn’t much thought to a larger canvas, but the
movie’s achingly sincere purity of spirit makes for a passable tearjerker.
16×9 televisions, the film comes with a Dolby digital 2.0 stereo track. Both
are entirely adequate, as there’s not much in the way of grandeur to inject
into the narrative. There are unfortunately no supplemental bonus materials to
complement the DVD release, which is puzzling only insomuch as the title of
such ridiculous ownership would seem to beg for some sort of interview or chat
with James Patterson. Alas… no. C (Movie) C- (Disc)