Blue Valentine (2010) 7/10
Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) are married and have a six year-old daughter. We learn how their romance began at the same time as we see their present-day marriage crumbling at the edges.
Before last week, I’d say Blue Valentine was most famous for successfully fighting its original NC-17 rating, but now it’s got Michelle Williams’s Oscar nomination going for it. There was no reason on earth this movie should be NC-17, but if you have seen This Film Is Not Yet Rated (which I recommend) the reason is obvious. (Hint: The MPAA hates cunnilingus, no matter how discreetly portrayed.)
Blue Valentine is filmed with a disturbing intimacy, and an alarming lack of blame. I saw the IMDb message boards aflame with who is “at fault” in the breakdown of Dean and Cindy’s relationship. Movies, of course, always show you fault, but Blue Valentine shows you two very flawed people who cannot for the life of them figure out how to interact together day to day in a way that preserves the intimate glow and innocent pleasure of being together they had at the start.
It’s not obvious at first that Dean is a drunk. Neither the script nor Gosling use any of the typical shortcuts to showing that someone is an alcoholic; it’s introduced fairly subtly, but we see in Dean a great deal of decay. Just seven years earlier, he had more vitality, better posture, and more focus. It’s not either Dean’s alcoholism or his younger self that makes Gosling’s performance great, it’s the delicate contrast and connectedness between the two.
Cindy, for her part, has gone from girlish and excited about life to serious and cynical. As we learn more about her, we see the cynicism was probably always there, hinted at around the edges by her unpleasant family; she’s never really seen a happy relationship and fears falling in love because of that. For Cindy, there’s “in love” and “out of love” and she doesn’t understand how these mysterious things happen. Maybe that’s most people’s condition. From the comfort of your movie seat, it’s easy to see that Cindy doesn’t know how to make decisions, see warning signs, ask for respect, or a host of other things that are really necessary to form a relationship. Except the movie seat isn’t that comfortable, because we’re right up close and entangled with the small moments that decay a marriage.
It’s not like any of these arguments are even that big a deal. He misunderstands her in ways that seem deliberate, she has no tolerance for being even a little misunderstood. He’s quick to take offense, she’s quicker to be defensive. But none of it is loud or showy or about really important things. Mostly, they never talk about what’s really on their minds. Dean’s attempts to rekindle romance are pathetic, but tend to get the audience’s sympathy more than Cindy’s resistance to him, yet I think we all know what it’s like to feel like, hell, this just ain’t worth it.
What’s wrong with Blue Valentine is that it isn’t that much of a contrast. Dean’s deft talent for verbal abuse is there from their first meeting, and this relationship is shown clearly to have never had a chance. A more interesting movie would have been one in which a stronger, more loving relationship is shown to crumble, as they so often and so sadly do. In addition, there’s a low-level rumble of classism; like, this is what happens to you if you have no education, or are from a depressed area of Pennsylvania. There’s a little bit of scripting in the direction of, if only Cindy had gone to medical school as she dreamed, she wouldn’t be having these problems.
It’s a worthy movie, with great performances, but not a perfect one.
2 Responses to “Movie Review: Blue Valentine”
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I was very turned off by these characters as the film progressed — particularly Cindy. As we find out more about her past, she becomes more and more unsympathetic. Dean is a total loser, so she has every right to be falling out of love with him. But Cindy’s own disrespect for herself irked me overall.
I agree Debbs. The writing is at times so subtle. The conversation that Cindy and Dean have in the car, having pulled out of the liquor mart, on the way to the cheap sex motel is a case in point. It’s excruciating to watch not least because of what the two don’t say to one another. The awkward back and forth only emphasises the ellipsis: Cindy avoids mention of her hurt and regret at seeing her ex and, somewhat disingenuously, denounces the ex as a ‘loser’ in order to spare Dean’s feelings (or, is it so as not to incur Dean’s wrath and a beating? – the atmosphere of threatened violence pervades their relationship); Dean avoids communicating any sense of his jealousy at the mention of Cindy’s ex and pathetically fails in his attempt to hide his awareness of his having become a vast disappointment to his wife, his awareness that he is the ‘loser’. They recriminate indirectly – Dean, subjecting his wife to a passive-aggressive inquisition over her revealing comment that ‘then you wouldn’t feel so bad’, with his ‘what do you mean? What do you mean, ‘then I wouldn’t feel so bad’? What’s that supposed to mean?’; Cindy, later in the motel, when she questions Dean over what he wants to do with his life and how his natural passion brought to any activity worth the effort could see him accomplish so much more – an oblique reproach for his being a colossal failure. Their situation is so pathetic, in the truest sense of that word. It’s a wonder that Gosling hasn’t been recognised by the Academy with a nomination for his performance – but the Academy is routinely wrong about most things. A very good film indeed, though not a great one.