One Cassavetes, two Cassavetes… .

Critics are having fun comparing director Nick Cassavetes’ adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ novel “The Notebook” with what his father, the late filmmaker John Cassavetes, did during his career. The comparison is not only unfair, it’s simply silly.

“The Notebook” tells the story of a couple ( Ryan Gosling , Rachel McAdams ) who fall in love, are separated by World War II and then even further estranged by their different backgrounds (she’s rich, he’s not). The story is told in flashback by a man (James Garner) reading from a notebook to an addled woman living ( Gena Rowlands ) in a rest home. Better than it has any right to be, the movie is stately paced by director Nick Cassavetes, well acted especially by McAdams and Garner (who actually cries) and shot lovingly in Asheville, N.C. Still, nothing Cassavetes does can overcome the cloying melodrama at the heart of Sparks’ story of obsession passing as love.

Yet what about the elder Cassavetes? A guy who put the “i” in American independent film, the sometime actor (“The Dirty Dozen,” “Rosemary’s Baby” ) made searing character studies such as “Faces” (1968), “Husbands” (1970), “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974) and “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” (1976). Even so, Cassavetes was far from a complete filmmaker. His movies feel raw, sure, but a lot of that rawness is similar to the discomfort that comes when you experience actors improvising on stage. If you’re looking for realism, go elsewhere.

The elder Cassavetes once said , “Films today show only a dream world and have lost touch with the way people really are.” True enough, as any Jerry Bruckheimer production proves. But Cassavetes’ own films were, though hardly escapist fantasy in the fashion of “The Notebook,” was only his personal vision. And battling demons, especially the ones that plagued the hard-drinking Cassavetes, can be its own way of escaping the day-to-day opportunities that each day offers.