Login
In a holiday season that has been full of so-called "Oscar contenders" that have been mostly decent yet nowhere close to greatness, BLUE VALENTINE has come along as the most refreshing of exceptions. Easily 2010's most powerful and devastating drama, the film benefits greatly from its unflinching commitment to realism and from two of the most raw and blood-curdling performances you'll see in the entire year. It's too bad that BLUE VALENTINE has gotten such a limited release, which may well affect its ability to be seen by awards voters, thus keeping it from getting the heavy amount of recognition that it absolutely deserves. Two years ago, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD gave us an amazing depiction of the implosion of a marriage in the 1950s, and now BLUE VALENTINE does just as expert a job at giving us the implosion of a modern marriage. This is the best example of painful-yet-emotionally-cathartic cinema that I've seen this year.
BLUE VALENTINE plays with the timelines (quite brilliantly, I should add), so for purposes of the synopsis, I'll just talk about what happens when we're first introduced to our characters. Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) are a lower-middle class couple living with their daughter and dog. He works for a moving company and she works as a nurse in a doctor's office. There's a definite strain in their relationship, almost as if their marriage has lost the life it used to have. Perhaps to try to remedy that, Dean (who still gets as excited as a child whenever he comes up with a fun idea) decides they should leave their daughter with her grandfather for a night, and that they should go to one of those romantic "fantasy rooms" that they have in certain motels. The embittered Cindy, who resents Dean for still being so infantile and for not exploiting his "potential" as much as he could, skeptically agrees to go on the foray. As you might imagine, what happens at the motel isn't as rosy and romantic as what you would see in the dross of "relationship movies" that Hollywood doles out every year. The issues between Cindy and Dean are quite complicated, and the sexual dynamics here have devolved into something that will inevitably cause you to cringe.
Suddenly, the film starts cutting back to earlier times, and rather than going directly into showing us the sweet beginning of Cindy and Dean's relationship, we get the background on each of them individually before they meet. Dean is helping an old man move into a nursing home, while Cindy is there visiting her grandmother, and that's where it all begins. It turns out, though, that Cindy's future was a lot brighter at this point in time: she dressed a lot better and she had plans of going to medical school. It all gets complicated, though, when Dean starts wanting to date her, without knowing that Cindy's having sex with her teaching fellow, Bobby (Mike Vogel), who turns out to be a particularly vicious character. Cindy finally relents to Dean's charms and starts going out with him. It looks like Bobby's now out of the picture. When Cindy discovers something that seems to throw a wrench into everything and Dean decides to stick by her in spite of it, the relationship blossoms into something that we'd all like to think would last forever.
The first substantial conversation between Cindy and Dean happens during a bus ride, and the conversation is a freaking delight to listen to, not only because it sets up the goofiness that Cindy will initially be won over by yet eventually grow tired of, but because there are oodles of hilarity and reality in it. Dean makes a comment about how women who are as attractive as Cindy don't have to do much, and they can just be "crazy and unfunny" without caring about the consequences of that. Cindy wryly comments on how amazing it is that Dean can both compliment and insult her at the same time, and to prove him wrong about being unfunny, she tells a joke about a child molester that you will inevitably laugh SUPER hard at, regardless of how "wrong" it feels to find it funny. But then again, that's a good way to describe the overall experience of watching BLUE VALENTINE. It's incredibly sad and heart-breaking, yet it's impossible not to laugh at times, maybe because we find some of the situations familiar or maybe because, as everyone should know, you can find something amusing in even the darkest of circumstances.
BLUE VALENTINE ends on a somewhat jarring and indefinite note that makes the audience be unsure as to what's going to happen next with Cindy and Dean. Because of the way this moment is edited (still intercutting between the past and present), I have my own interpretation of what'll happen, but I can't really discuss it here without spoiling it for those who haven't seen it. What I WILL reveal to anyone reading this is that I got a feeling during the final moments of the movie that I haven't gotten in a long time while watching a film - in fact, the last time was 5 years ago, with Noah Baumbach's THE SQUID AND THE WHALE. I was sad that the movie had ended and that I couldn't spend more time with these characters. It's not often that I want a film to be longer, but there's no doubt that I would've wanted BLUE VALENTINE to go on for another half hour at least. On the one hand, it feels like a flaw of the movie, because it has left you wanting more, which would mean that it didn't satisfy you as much as it could've, but on the other hand, saying "These characters were so great that I wanted to spend even more time with them" sounds like nothing but praise - and it is. The only real problem that I had with the film has to do with its skimpy and haphazard development of the character of Bobby. We only get a glimpse at him, but the glimpse just portrays him as a one-dimensional frat boy type. The scene in which he and some buddies go to Dean's workplace to beat him up feels generic and like it doesn't belong in the film. Still, that's only a minor point.
It severely grates me that BLUE VALENTINE's limited release may mean no Oscar nominations for Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, who give two of the most raw and honest performances of the year. If I had to pick what was the most difficult scene for me to watch in any movie this year, it would undoubtedly be the scene at the abortion clinic (and no, that's not a spoiler - watch the movie and you'll see why). Sure, the subject matter alone would've been enough to make for a disturbing scene, but Williams makes the scene as painful as nails on a chalkboard. Her fear and desperation are dreadfully palpable. By this point in the film, we've gotten to know Cindy and we care deeply about both her and Dean, and we don't want her to suffer. If you go see BLUE VALENTINE and don't feel as engrossed by it as I was, I plead with you to stay right until the end to witness Gosling's performance in the final moments in the kitchen. In this scene, Dean's implosion as a character is simply devastating. It's almost too much to take. Everything that he had been holding in during the film, hiding it under all the goofiness, comes out like venom. That's great acting in my book.
Though people have different tastes when it comes to films, if there's one thing that's a certainty, it's that going to the movies is escapism. It doesn't matter if you're going to laugh or to get scared or whatever: you're still getting away from your world and entering another. Some may see that as a bad thing because it might mean that you're avoiding your reality, but I don't see it that way. I like the world I live in, but I feel that going to the movies has the potential to be a fantastic, magical experience because you can plunge into a world you're not familiar with, and you can feel and learn things you wouldn't otherwise be exposed to. What a film like BLUE VALENTINE demonstrates is that you don't need the "movie world" to be fantasy-based for it to be a powerful experience. In fact, BLUE VALENTINE is as close to harsh reality as it gets, but that doesn't make the experience of watching it any less searing or affecting - quite the contrary. The film's naturalistic approach is terrific precisely because the emotional demons that emerge during the film are so authentic and relatable. BLUE VALENTINE is like a dark cousin to last year's (500) DAYS OF SUMMER in that it portrays the development of a relationship by playing with its timelines, sometimes exposing very interesting parallelisms/comparisons between what is happening in the present and what had happened in the past. While the two films are equally good, there's no doubt that this one is a lot less light-hearted. As dark relationship dramas go, BLUE VALENTINE is nothing short of amazing.
8/10
