Blue Valentine (**)
Directed by: Derek Cianfrance
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams, John Doman, Faith Wladyka,
Mike Vogel
Seen: March 18th 2011
** Out of ****
Dean (Gosling) wakes up one morning when he hears his daughter Frankie
(Wladyka) frantically searching for her dog. Someone has left the gate open,
and the beloved Labrador has “escaped” into the wide world. The balding Dean
with his unflattering glasses consoles his daughter, but wastes no time in
letting his wife Cindy (Williams) know that he told her to lock the gate.
This is the timeframe the movie starts in, but it also jumps to
another, where Dean is much more attractive and where Frankie isn’t in the
picture yet. In this time, approximately 5 or 6 years earlier, Dean is a high
school dropout working for a New York moving company. On the job, while moving
a man into an old age home, he glimpses Cindy in a room across the hall,
visiting her grandmother. He hands her his card, and even though she doesn’t
call him, as she has a boyfriend, the two eventually meet up when Bobby (Vogel)
and Cindy experience tough times, Cindy going to Dean for consolation. The two
fall in love rather quickly, and also get married soon thereafter when Cindy
finds out that she is pregnant with possibly Dean’s, but probably Bobby’s
child. En route to the marriage the two share beautiful romantic moments;
including a beautiful song by Dean, accompanying a tap-dancing Cindy in front
of a clothing store with a heart on the door.
Scenes of romantic bliss are undercut with ones of their relationship
falling apart, with a hopeless Dean trying but failing at getting the
relationship spark back again, and with Cindy almost rebelliously refusing
Dean’s advances, even when they go for a night away in a last-ditch and non-earnest
attempt to find the love again. Jumping back and forth between the inception
and the collapse of the relationship, the movie is at times sweetly romantic,
and at times brutally uneasy to watch. This effect is bolstered by the use of
different cameras for the different timelines. The start-up of the romance was
filmed with more nostalgic looking Super 16mm film while the later more
crushing scenes were filmed with the more modern and gritty Red One (I know
very little about these cameras and might be wrong here).
While the movie has its fair share of beauty in the start of the
relationship, the eventual dissolution can at times seem a little negative. Not
that this isn’t the way relationships can crumble though; I think Hollywood is
to blame for an expectation of relationships always ending up happily ever
after. In Blue Valentine it is just the opposite of the Hollywood norm however,
and while there is a raw honesty in the brilliant portrayal of these two bitter
individuals by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, I don’t necessarily see the
need for it. A famous critic said that a great movie cannot be depressing, but
I feel at certain times a line can be drawn, as any story should have some kind
of a silver lining to its dark looming cloud. We go to the movies to escape
just what this movie so avidly depicts, and I can therefore not support the
movie wholeheartedly; as however good it may be, I couldn’t find honest
big-screen enjoyment in it. Had it been a TV movie, I’d have long since changed
the channel.
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