Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Ryan Gosling
Michelle Williams
John Doman
Directed By:
Derek Cianfrance
Proper, accurate representation of love is something I'm obsessed about in fiction. It's a feeling dismissed by science as a rationalization of your sexual instincts and also dismissed by modern cynicism as a keystone to economics. And yet, in between the I-Love-Yous and the corny romance they try to sell you as the truth from Hollywood to Harlequin Headquarters, it's there. It's not tangible or it doesn't produce any hard data that science can analyze, yet it's an invisible energy feel that binds people together. It's the kind of thing I like to observe. Blue Valentine pegs itself as a love story. Usually, movies don't show these. They show desire a lot, but the credits roll before any sign of love can be displayed. Couldn't happen here, since Dean (Gosling) and Cindy (Williams) have been married for eight years at the very start of the movie. So I had to give it a shot.
They've been married and things aren't kosher at all between them. Cindy is a doctor and Dean is a house painter. Nothing links them together, except for their little girl Frankie (Faith Wladyka) who takes a lot of energy from them and somehow contributes involuntarily to the drift of their wedding. In an effort to salvage what's left of their sinking ship, Dean organizes a little getaway in a funky looking motel. Far away from everything but themselves, they are submerged by their memories and the viewers discover through a series of well-brought flashbacks how they came to be together. It's Dean that won Cindy over and charmed her with his simple, almost bohemian approach to life and with his sincerity. They are trying to understand how they have come to treat each other like shit and gauge if there is a little love left in between them.
Derek Cianfrance is a talented young man, no doubt. He wrote and shot a story that will peak into your soul and see what kind of person you are. It's not Dean or Cindy's fault if their wedding is going adrift, unless you decide to side with one of them. It's the way they both handled the happy ever after that brings their relationship to a fork in the road. They both knew how to make their initial desire fructify as love, but once they got there, they started living a monotonous and maddening daily life without taking care of each other. Blue Valentine draws a brutal portrait of the difficulties of love, but tries to remain honest and give its character the fate they deserve. The dialogues are sometimes convoluted and hard to follow because they contain so many idioms and "insides" in between characters, but it's Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams that keep it so successful with their non-verbal acting.
Film buffs will also find a lot to like about Blue Valentine. Derek Cianfrance has a good sense of pacing and keeps the narration fluid despite all the breaks in the timeline. The flashbacks don't use any of the Hollywood cliché techniques and yet they don't make the story hard to follow because they are inserted in lulls where is would make sense for the characters to look back on their lives together. Blue Valentine is an intimate, almost voyeuristic look inside Dean and Cindy's wedding that Derek Cianfrance keeps at a good distance enough to make it work. His use of blue filters throughout the entire movie gives it the necessary alteration to make it feel like a dream and not like you're peeping through the keyhole. Well-crafted and well acted, a bit deficient in the dialogues, Blue Valentine packs enough punch to keep anybody in the loop for at least a single viewing. A challenging viewing, but maybe not something I will repeat anytime soon.
SCORE: 86%