Blue Valentine (Review)

Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine depicts a dying marriage in the way that Saving Private Ryan depicted World War II: as unflinchingly brutal as possible. Watching it is like being in a car that’s driving at full speed towards a brick wall. There’s nothing you can do to change the car’s course, so you sit there and await the impending doom.

Michelle Williams, one of the most haunting actresses we have, plays Cindy, while Ryan Gosling plays her husband Dean. The film flashes back and forth between their marriage’s final days and the happy days when it all began. Dean is an idealist if there ever was one, constantly proclaiming his love for Cindy even though his true feelings very well might be different. He’s spent his whole life refusing to grow up.

Cindy, meanwhile, is so mature that it’s Dean’s very childishness that is attractive to her, if only at first. She is trying to get a stable career as a doctor (currently a nurse) but in the final days of their marriage she has to not only care for their daughter but Dean as well. While he’s perfectly content goofing around with the kid at home, Cindy keeps going to work, trying to remain sane.

Yet their relationship did not seem so doomed at the beginning. As a medical student, Cindy cared for her grandmother while dating a wrestler. She becomes more and more dissatisfied with her life, and when she comes across Dean she begins to feel happier about her life. She feels that Dean will never mistreat her, and due to circumstances I will not spoil here she decides to marry him. Many films would end here, showing our young couple riding off into the sunset. But it is not to be.

Blue Valentine looks upon these early days with a mix of admiration and condescension, hoping to provide an answer to the ageless question: why did I fall in love with this person? How did this all begin? Here, we see that. We know why these two kids got married, but we also see that the marriage was likely doomed to be a short one. Many people might have guessed Dean and Cindy would not be together forever, but they themselves were not among them. In their eyes, they were destined for each other.

This film gets a whole lot right. Just about all of it feels incredibly real, and the audience buys every new, painful development. This is helped, of course, by the performances of Gosling and Williams, who play characters who try as hard as they can not to give up, but in the end there is only one option. These two people were truly in love at one point, but we see that, but this love has eroded away to nothing. Williams’ Best Actress nomination is wholly deserved.

Unfortunately, Blue Valentine is occasionally too obvious, driving home the message that true love is either difficult to find or just plain nonexistent. Cindy’s parents scream at each other, and her grandma speaks about how she never truly fell in love. She’s already in the middle of an unsatisfying relationship, so in case you missed it: relationships are terrible and pointless. So yeah.

It’s an unpleasant movie that remains powerful, and I know I won’t be forgetting it in the near future. The scale is small, but the ambitions are large, and Blue Valentine hits the mark far more often than it overstays its welcome. It’s an indie movie down to its core, and it flaunts that to a sometimes annoying degree, but it’s more than worth seeing thanks to the memorable work of Gosling and Williams in the leading roles. It’s just not quite as transcendent as it thinks it is.

Rating:  (out of 4)