The Reel Critic - 2/24/11

Blue Valentine

Blue Valentine, directed by Derek Cianfrance, was notorious well before its release: after screening to high praise at both the Cannes and Sundance Film Festival, the MPAA bestowed an NC-17 rating on it, the most restrictive rating short of that reserved for pornography (the rating is considered box office poison — most major theater chains don’t show NC-17 films). Harvey Weinstein, who produced the film with the Weinstein Company, and who is known for his pugnacious approach to marketing his movies, appealed the decision with a legal team that included David Boies of Bush v. Gore fame. Blue Valentine is now rated R and has also successfully garnered the curiosity of everyone who wouldn’t have been interested in seeing it until they heard that it was rated NC-17. Well played, Weinsteins.

However, if you go to see Blue Valentine expecting sexy time with Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, prepare to exit disappointed and deeply pessimistic about love. It’s not that it doesn’t deliver on its promise of sex, nor is it a disappointment as a film — in fact, the opposite — but every image of the thrilling and wonderful aspects of being with someone is countered by a stronger image of the anger, sorrow and despair that a failing relationship can bring. As the lead couple Dean and Cindy, Gosling and Williams bring alive, with startling realism and intense detail, both the core personality differences that are eventually impossible to overcome, as well as the little, annoying quirks and habits that escalate until they’re unbearable. Cianfrance uses an inventive non-chronological structure to show the audience, with equal weight, the halcyon days of falling in love and the slow, painful dissolution of a marriage. The scenes switch without notice from past to present, and it is difficult at first to tell immediately what time period we are in. Soon, though, you become attuned to the slight changes in the color palette: brighter in the past, bluer and colder in the present.

We are more sympathetic to Dean at first: he is goofy, compassionate, a wonderful father to a daughter, Frankie, that isn’t biologically his, and uncomplicated in his desires. Cindy is less endearing, even in flashbacks — where she was once only cautious, she is now dismissive and cold. Gosling and Williams’ painstaking and complex performances tell us much more than what is in the script. Soon, we see Dean drinking more than he should, and is entirely ignorant of his wife’s emotional state. His connection with daughter Frankie is strong in part because of his own childishness. In an early scene, Cindy throws together just-add-water oatmeal for Frankie, and Dean criticizes her for not making real oatmeal, oblivious to the fact that she’s late for her thankless job and he’s at home. He tells Frankie she doesn’t need to eat the oatmeal and makes breakfast into a game. In a single, sustained look, Michelle Williams conveys everything Cindy is feeling: upset at the injustice of her daughter thinking her father is more fun, annoyed at Dean’s undermining of her parenting and frustrated at working harder for their family than he does, but less visibly so.

There is genuine drama in much of the plot, but the quick cuts between years focus on how the mundane and quotidian details of Dean and Cindy’s lives develop into a pattern that eventually destroys them. This is what is so affecting, and frightening, about Blue Valentine — the idea that it could happen to you, no matter how little you share in common with its protagonists or the world they inhabit. The problems they experience are the problems of every relationship, and neither character is especially unreasonable or difficult. The scenes of the early parts of their relationship are so joyful and affirming that it is all the more brutal to see minor disaffections begin to consume them. The first day that Dean and Cindy spend together, running around Brooklyn, eager to know every single thing about each other and only slightly shy to tell, is the kind of memory that we want to cling on to forever, just as the couple (especially Dean) does. But Blue Valentine is never sentimental or nostalgic, just unflinchingly honest.

It may have the outward appearance of a paint-by-numbers Sundance indie, with its casting of Williams and Gosling, score by Grizzly Bear and Brooklyn setting, but Blue Valentine belongs more to the school of fictional cinema verité. To return to the infamous sex scenes that have brought Blue Valentine attention — though no more explicit than most R-rated films, they’re frustrating and sad and deeply uncomfortable. In other words, they are real — something much scarier and sometimes more thrilling than what we expect when we read the MPAA label.