Blue Valentine

If I were to describe the 'plot' of Blue Valentine to you - couple breaks up as we see flashbacks to how they got together - well, it would sound banal and uninteresting. I wouldn't really want to see a movie about that, so maybe you don't either. But this isn't a film to take at face value - it's a masterclass in script structure. In essence we have two stories playing out, the creation of a relationship, and it's collapse. Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) are a young working class couple with a five-year old daugher named Frankie (Faith Wladyka). We start the film with the beginning of the relationship's breakdown... it's a marriage in stagnation, Cindy feels trapped and numb whilst Dean reaches for affection in escalating frustration. As we begin to learn the current dynamic of the couple the filmd also starts cutting back to their pre-marriage lives and the story of their blossoming love.

In a way it's quite a harsh film. We fall in love with them falling in love, their courtship is sweet, unabashed, entrancing... and at the same time we have to watch their love in the present as it degenerates into this complicated and vaguely unpleasant thing weighed down by their shared past. The brilliance of the way the past and present scenes are sequenced is that the details that we first see or hear of in the present are later given relevance and resonance by the scenes set in the past. The film simply couldn't work in a linear fashion. Instead it's a big cycle, as out of step with real time as Dean and Cindy become out of step with one another.

Williams is effectively givin two vastly different performances - the cold, uncommunicative characterisation of the present, and her hopeful and adorable youth. Ryan Gosling is equally good as Dean, giving a thoughtful and real performance of a hopeless romantic starved of love. This might be an intensely subjective interpretation on my part (coming at the film from the perspective of a man means that, in this case, I identify more with the male character) but Dean is a real life hero. His attitude to their child and the non-mention of what he did for Cindy and Frankie gives him the higher ground in my view, making it hard for me to empathise too much with Cindy. However, this is beside the point, picking sides doesn't achieve anything - the dissolution of a marriage is what it is, people often can't help the way they feel and Michelle Williams therefore has the harder part to play as the emotionally shut-down Cindy. These are real people making real mistakes, Blue Valentine never glosses over that - it takes the ugliness of reality as much as it take the beauty too.

I found one subtle aspect of the film incredibly interesting... the formative years of Cindy and Dean's respective childhoods are only alluded to in almost throwaway dialogue, but their backgrounds are a big part of why their relationship turns out the way it does (just like real life). Cindy's promiscuous youth and the influence of her bullish father as the dominant male role model in her life links into her unfulfillable desire for a connection and subconscious expectations regarding manhood and masculinity. Meanwhile, Dean's motherless childhood feeds into abandonment issues and associated insecurities that lead to jealousy. It's an interesting (and largely unsaid) subtext that deals with how broken homes may or may not affect the development of a child - Dean was raised in a broken home and turned out to be an inherently good man and father, whereas Cindy's parents remained together and she turned out to be a psychologically damaged individual (presumably) due to the pressures a loveless marriage put on her parents. This suggests that, despite Dean's wishes, staying together might not be the best thing for their daughter Frankie. It's a thought-provoking suggestion, the film never pushes it to the forefront but it's there all the same.

We've always had films about the dramas of real life, it's just that they're more realistic now and not crafted by artifice into exaggerated Hollywood melodrama. Blue Valentine is deceptively simple in execution but the way that writer-director Derek Cianfrance has steered partially-improvised performances and his award-winning script into such a carefully constructed and effective film deserves high praise. It's a funny and devastating examination of true love, bittersweet as a 'blue' valentine.

TRIVIA: To further heighten the 'reality' of this film, Ryan Gosling actually worked with a moving company to get into character. The guy who plays his co-worked Jamie (James Benatti) was his actual co-worker, and not an actor.

DIRECTOR: Derek Cianfrance
WRITER/SOURCE: Loosely autobiographical script by Derek Cianfrance, Cami Delavigne and Joey Curtis.
KEY ACTORS: Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams, Faith Wladuka, John Doman, Mike Vogel.

RELATED TEXTS:
- Derek Cianfrance's previous film was Brother Tied, an obscure indie feature-length made all the way back in 1998. The success of Blue Valentine means that his next full-length project, Metalhead, won't take as long to make.
- Allmovie.com compares Blue Valentine to The Hungry Ghosts, a drama about dysfunctional love by Sopranos star Michael Imperioli.
- I saw some tonal similarity to the film Pieces of April, a digitally-shot indie film about a fractured family coming together for Thanksgiving.
- The 1980s Meryl Streep films Heartburn and Falling in Love also deal with marriage break-ups and relationships, but they're a lot more 80s and neither of them is a particularly good film so I wouldn't go out of your way check them out.
- For other good films about the harsh realities of love, see (500) Days of Summer and Closer.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nomination Best Actress (Michelle Williams)
Golden Globes - nomination Best Actress - Drama (Michelle Williams) and Best Actor - Drama (Ryan Gosling).
Independent Spirit - nomination Best Actress (Michelle Williams)
Sundance Film Festival - nomination Grand Jury Prize.