Blue Valentine (2010)
Blue Valentine Directed by Derek Cianfrance Written by Derek Cianfrance; Joey Curtis; Cami Delavigne Starring Ryan Gosling; Michele Williams; John Doman; Jen Jones; Faith Wladya; Mike Vogel
Not that it’s some kind of secret, but let it be said that Ryan Gosling (Lars and the Real Girl; Half Nelson) and Michelle Williams (Synechdoche, New York; Wendy and Lucy) are two of our finest working actors. Take their commitment to a project that has been incubating for years, and combine it with a passionate first time feature director and co-writer (Derek CianFrance) who has long battled to bring it to screen, and there was an obvious potential for great things.
Using a fractured narrative that artfully bounces from present day to various seminal and everyday events in the relationship past of married couple Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams), Blue Valentine delivers information in a tight-fisted way, tantalizing an audience with a slow acclivity that allows us increasing bits of insight into the difficult, complicated, frustrating, and ultimately heartbreaking relationship between these two people.
Cindy, a hospital nurse, is obviously fairly bubbling with barely contained anger and resentment toward husband Dean, a house painter and amateur musician with an alcohol problem, who seems relatively content with his mundane job, cigarettes, and day time beers. While the couple clearly loves their young daughter Frankie (Faith Wladya), Dean is the goofy, fun Dad, while Cindy acts as the killjoy disciplinarian. The festering disallusionment and misunderstanding are practically tangible as the two seem almost entirely unable to relate to one another - Cindy nearly silent; both of them taking cheap verbal shots at one another. Ryan drinks too much, Cindy seems uninterested in touching her husband, but the open question propelling us forward is what exactly happened to these two people that brought them to this point?
In most relationship films, the answers would eventually reveal themselves to be of the easy and pat variety, the life of this coupling delineated in a series of obvious, readily identifiable plot points drawing a clear charted path to the dysfunctional place where they currently reside. Blue Valentine is never that simple or obvious, and the few answers we do get arrive in the form of non linear (though brilliantly placed) flashbacks, which wind up supplying us with important details that help to contextualize, but hardly definitively explain, the couple’s myriad issues.
Director Cianfrance’s documentary background is obvious, and he shoots in an apt handheld style, skillfully allowing a series of small scenes to unfold, each contributing to the story like so many children’s building blocks. To say that the naturalistic acting on display is first rate would be a severe understatement. Gosling and Williams individual and dual portrayals of two halves of a couple accomplishes the very difficult feat of illuminating for us a damaged relationship that feels dutifully lived in, one marked by silences as telling as any of the words they manage to utter to one another.
The end result of the characterizations by these two actors are all the more remarkable because they are not the kind of showy, emotive performances that can sometimes stand outside of a film, instead feeling fully work-shopped, developed, and ultimately realized, their interior subjective and shared reality peeking through in looks, gestures, and muttered lines of dialogue. The two actors work in concert to draw a picture of a disintegrating marriage between two real people, each possessing their own individual pre-meeting pasts, as well as evolving perceptions of one another, themselves, and their own history together.
It may be impossible to accurately pinpoint the essence of what lies between two people entwined in any romantic relationship, and Blue Valentine seems to take this concept as a given, respecting the idea that the exact elements that go into any coupling may be virtually unknowable. Instead, as the story develops, the moments between these two begin to accumulate, and (bolstered by what we learn about how they got together), we can begin to draw our own conclusions about what exactly has brought their relatively short marriage to such dire straights.
A wonderful debut from a talented director and two performances that will easily stand alongside any other in 2010 are the highlights of a film that serves as an example that despite all the evidence to the contrary there is still vital cinema being made in this country.