Blue Valentine - Derek Cianfrance

Where does love go? Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine does not attempt to answer that question, but instead offers a frank, sometimes brutal, meditation on the vacuum created once affection spends itself. This is a portrait of a relationship on the precipice, of two people torn apart by their personal disappointments and struggling to keep their heads above water. Beautifully crafted and executed, Blue Valentine is one of the most affecting and dramatically rich films to come along in a long time.

Cianfrance tells the story in two parts. The first takes place in the present day, when the marriage of Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams), is on its last legs. The film opens on an ominous note: the family dog is missing, having escaped through an unlatched gate. Dean puts on a brave face for daughter Frankie (Faith Wladyka) but when the dog is found dead, he unleashes his frustrations on Cindy, blaming her for the gate being unlocked. Dean and Cindy send Frankie to spend the night at her grandparents’ house while they dispose of the dog’s remains and Dean decides to make the most of the opportunity by taking Cindy away for the night. Cindy, a nurse who is on-call the following day, has no interest in going to a “cheesy sex motel” but doesn’t put up much of a fight about it and half-heartedly goes along. Once at the motel Dean struggles to find a way to reconnect with her, growing increasingly frustrated as it becomes apparent that Cindy has mentally checked out of the relationship.

The second part of the story takes place in the past, when the two first met and fell in love. At the time Dean is working for a moving company and helping an elderly client move into the nursing home where Cindy’s grandmother is resident. For him it’s love at first sight, but she needs some convincing. She’s just coming out of a bad breakup, but Dean’s persistence and charm eventually wins her over and they begin dating. Unfortunately they soon have to deal with the fallout from her last relationship, which has consequences that will define and shape the rest of their lives.

Blue Valentine is a film with such transcendently well-drawn characters that it needs little more than their personalities to drive the story forward. Present day Dean is a troubled man – troubled in ways that are subtly hinted at in the flashback scenes – but not a bad man. When he declares that he doesn’t deserve to be treated with coldness, we can’t help but agree with him, especially once the history between Dean and Cindy becomes more fleshed out for us. Dean is a stand-up guy who, at one time, went above and beyond what could reasonably be expected of him. The problem is that by doing so he’s set the bar rather high in Cindy’s eyes, making it easy for her to be disappointed in him in the future.

In a lesser film, Cindy would be made to seem shrewish and perhaps even ungrateful, but Cianfrance does such a deft job at creating a sense of balance that there really are no “sides” in this marital battle. We can at once agree with Dean that he deserves to be treated better while also empathizing with Cindy and understanding where her confession that she has “nothing left” comes from. In the beginning Dean’s childlike energy and sense of joy enchanted her, but now it’s something of a chore because living with him and Frankie is like raising two children. She’s been pushed to her wit’s end by his refusal to grow up and do his share of the heavy lifting, and she simply can’t understand why it is that he has chosen to stop growing. While they’re at the hotel, she expresses to him how much she wishes he had some ambition, telling him that she would be happier if he had a job that didn’t make him feel like he had to start drinking at eight in the morning. He corrects her, telling her that he has a job that allows him to start drinking at eight in the morning. We are given the sense that if only he wanted more, she could stir herself to want him; because he wants nothing, she cannot compel herself to give him anything.

On the surface, Blue Valentine sounds like a relentlessly depressing film, but there is a lightness mixed into it that is surprising. Cianfrance, Williams and Gosling are able to draw moments of humour out of the darkest passages and that’s one of many reasons why the film ultimately feels so authentic and unforced. At times when Dean and Cindy fight, their responses to each other are so over the top that you can’t help but chuckle; what makes these moments so well crafted is that while the film itself is aware of the humour in the dialogue, Dean and Cindy are not, and Gosling and Williams play it completely straight to great effect.

Both Williams and Gosling deliver magnificent performances. There is a lived-in feel to these characters and to their relationship, and though we only see Dean and Cindy at two points in their life together, the film does such a terrific job at drawing them as characters that we can effectively fill in the blanks. Blue Valentine is a terrific character study and, without question, a compelling and fascinating film.

Watch a trailer for the movie here: