Review

Review Date: 16-January-11
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Blue Valentine (2010)

Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine is both a modest and ambitious film. It tells the story of a marriage in a way that could reflect lives unfolding at this very moment in any number of places. As with most pieces of cinema vérité — apparently unvarnished expositions of real life — it gives an impression of smallness that challenges its essential goal of satisfying as a movie. Blue Valentine meets this challenge through the magnitude of its subject, love, and by providing a showcase for its actors. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are the cream of the born-in-the-eighties crop, and watching them illustrate bitter facts of life becomes a worthwhile end in itself.

The movie depicts two phases in a couple's relationship: the beginning and what might possibly be the end. We first encounter Dean and Cindy as harried parents of a little girl who have different views on how to deal with their lives and each other. Cindy, a nurse, has assumed the role of responsible adult in the family while Dean, a house painter, plays the carefree man-child who upholds the noble cause of fun. Cindy is all pursed lips and practicality while Dean wears his emotions on his sleeve, weeping when their dog gets hit by a car and reserving a room at a cheesy fantasyland hotel when their bickering reaches a crescendo. Williams digs deep during this chapter of the story, overcoming her fey, waif-like appearance to convey the sternness of a woman who has expended her tolerance for bullshit.

As husband and wife endure their night away from home, failing to rekindle their flame, we see scenes from their earliest days of togetherness. Each was a revelation to the other, the first person to offer love after an unfulfilling childhood. Although he felt beneath Cindy, whom he viewed as an educated beauty, Dean leapt at the chance to prove himself through devotion. Here Gosling reminds us of the role of blue-collar Prince Charming that won him fame in The Notebook. Yet Dean's finer days fade as the story jumps forward to troubled times again. After only a handful of years Dean and Cindy have adopted patterns which enflame her resentment, baffle his sense of purpose, and diminish their mutual affection. Perhaps these patterns were predictable, perhaps they could have been avoided. But unless they break them, which would require a desire that Cindy might not possess, the marriage is doomed.

Apart from a painful public blow-out, Blue Valentine doesn't have an end; its focus is the couple's transition from A to B, or rather the fact that they went from A to B, and all that this suggests. The underlying truth is that love, like everything else in human experience, is subject to habit. Unless common goals and attachments take hold when scarlet ardor recedes, anybody's valentine can turn blue.

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