Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
2/26/11
I'm
not married, never have been. Honestly, the institution makes me
a tad nervous, and the reason is the sheer volume of suffocating, soul-scorching
relationships I've witnessed second-hand verses a very small number that
lived up to the hype. A big reason is that the hype itself is a tad
overrated: people seem to simply talk themselves into the idea that
anyone willing to have them with whom they've had a few laughs is their
soulmate. So, while we'd all love to find that one-in-a-million connection
that really makes our hearts soar for the rest of our lives, far too many
of us end up like the characters in Blue Valentine. Derek
Cianfrance's time-skipping curdled love story casts Ryan Gosling and Michelle
Williams as two people who should never, ever have gotten married and watches
both the elusive sparks that started them down this path and the hollow
husk of a relationship that remains five years later. The stars put
on a clinic, with Williams at her most empathetic and Gosling essaying
one of the most hissable characters I've ever seen onscreen. It's
a movie some might find almost unbearably depressing, but for those of
us who're a little suspicious of this whole marriage thing to start with,
it's a simple, heart-rending statement of fact: be careful who you
let slip a ring onto your finger.
We
toggle back and forth over a five year period in the lives of Dean (Ryan
Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams), meeting them first as a soul-deadened
married couple with a young daughter (Faith Wladyka). He paints houses
for a living, she's a nurse. When the family dog is hit by a car,
he flees responsibility by insisting they take a night to themselves, booking
them a room in a truly horrid theme motel. Five years earlier, he
worked for a moving company and had a chance meeting with her as she cared
for her elderly grandmother (Jen Jones) at a retirement home. They
made each other smile, one thing led to another and now... the question
of how much more disappointment Cindy can endure from both her husband
and her life is about to be answered.
Without
giving away details best left for you to discover, there isn't much to
say about Blue Valentine's plot. While it does cover the two
most pivotal periods in this couple's life together, it's at least as much
about who they are as what they do. The world is full of guys like
Dean and most of us are connected to one of them in some way, so there
will be audiences forgiving to his point of view. I wasn't one of
them. There's no defense for the self-pitying, passive-aggressive
piece of crap he matures into, but Valentine's really fascinating
mystery is what Cindy saw in him in the first place. The younger
Dean is certainly less of a pill, but he's clearly without motivation to
do anything but find a woman to bear the full weight of his desperation
to be noticed. Yes, circumstances do move things along, but we can
also see how Cindy's home life with a dreadful father (John Doman) and
doormat mother (Maryann Plunket) predisposed her to this kind of relationship
even as she consciously tried to avoid it. Dean isn't all bad, he
does have his charm as a younger guy, and the older version certainly loves
their kid, but he is, to his very core, a worthless human being whose very
existence makes him a black hole into which the joy of all around him will
inevitably be sucked. And as we can see late in the game, there's
no physical abuse in this relationship, only emotional; but give it time....
That
Gosling was able to make me both believe in Dean and hate him so much is
a really remarkable achievement. Williams has gotten most of Valentine's
acting headlines, but his work is as good if not better for the skill with
which he's captured a snapshot of the dark side of masculinity rarely given
this much screen time. Dean spends a lot of the present day material
drunk, but even when he's not, it's really all the same because he's drunk
on his own self-pity and low self-esteem. The way he turns everything
into an argument by demanding clarification on just about every word to
come out of Cindy's mouth rings so true to life (who hasn't been in line
with THAT couple at the grocery store?) and makes it easy to see why she's
scared of him without him having laid a hand on her. It's a truly
loathsome tour de force. Williams is also truly terrific, particularly
in the way she creates a genuine light in the spirit of young Cindy and
then snuffs it out in her future. She's also able to toggle between
seeming like a realistic college student and full-fledged adult in the
two time periods, and the weight of far more than five years seems to pull
her down in the present-day scenes where she seems like a woman who couldn't
recall her last moment of real happiness.
The
script Cianfrance co-wrote with Cami Delavigne and Joey Curtis is very
cagey about what it tells us and when. Most of the assumptions one
would make upon first meeting adult Dean and Cindy prove to be false, and
there's even a moment or two when the husband seems irrational in the moment
but is later born out by the flashbacks. They're also smart about
what they DON'T tell us, leaving many questions of why youthful hopes gave
way to adult compromises unanswered. The director reportedly went
the extra mile to pump up Valentine's realism, using the real people
of Scranton, PA (where, for the record, I once had jury duty) in many of
the smaller roles and putting his stars through the paces of their jobs
and relationship off-screen to an unusually high degree. It works:
Blue Valentine creates the smaller-than-life sense of our own world
as well as any movie I've seen in quite some time, and no amount of fame
as former Oscar nominees stood in the way of me totally buying Gosling
and Williams as people I'd walk past on the way out of the movie.
Blue
Valentine does what it does very skillfully, but because any relationship
is a Rorschach test, what it does is a question different people will answer
differently. But whether you think it charts the sad decline of a
once-hopeful romance or reaffirms the futility of marrying the first person
who comes along, I can't imagine anyone calling it emotionally inauthentic.
Depressing as hell; yeah, I can imagine hearing it called that. You
know who you are. |
