Blue Valentine... Artful Porn or A Marriage Worn?

Blue Valentine - Love's Inferno Turns To Ash
review by Tony Freitas

What is the thing that ignites the flame of desire?  Is it a ukulele played in the alcove of a closed storefront? Is it a dark joke about a child going into the woods with a pedophile? And is time an inevitable killer that douses that fire?
Blue Valentine is constructed like  an episode of HGTV's "Spice Up My Kitchen" in reverse.  An ugly dysfunctional kitchen is remodeled into a contemporary thing of beauty.  In Blue Valentine a thing of beauty becomes ugly and dysfunctional. And the movie plays out much the way I prefer to watch "Spice"; I watch the 5 minute Before and the 5 minute After, but fast forward through the fifteen minutes in the middle when all the sweat and hard work takes place. Blue Valentine is the figurative last minutes in the marriage of Dean (Ryan Gossling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams). Six years has taken it's toll and husband and wife sleepwalk through the machinations of coupledom with daughter Frankie, the only relief from themselves and each other. 

Ryan Gossling's reaction to the film's NC17 rating. The decision was reversed
and Blue Valentine released with an R rating.

Then it's on to the first 5 minutes, 6 years prior, and the lovely seeds of blossoming love. Dean is sweet natured, artistic and funny (he sings and plays a ukulele for god's sake) if a little wayward. Cindy is coy and vulnerable and focused on career. Dean's attraction to Cindy is instant and consuming. His pursuit of her is the stuff that romance is made of.  There's is not just a sexual fire (because much has been made of the films graphic portrayal of sexuality), but a fire of possibility, and renewal and emotional rescue.  All those things that love can be in the beginning.  The attraction between Cindy and Dean is powerful and dangerous. Things like logic and consequence fall aside when love is this blinding. Cindy has dreams of medical school, but she just can't keep her legs together.  And we all know promiscuous young women are to be punished for being as sexual and desirous as their male counterparts. In a horror film it's an axe to the head, in Blue Valentine it's an unwanted pregnancy followed by the slow death of dashed dreams and deflated expectations. Otherwise known as marriage.

Back to the future, six years down the line.  
The things you loved become the things you hate. Potential has become lack of ambition, coy has become remote and indifferent and passion has become apathy. Settling.  
For Cindy this is unbearable. She might have been a doctor - rather than a nurse -  Dean might have been something, anything other than what he actually is: a house painter. That Dean is content to be unremarkable is unforgivable.  When the two meet, Cindy is dazzled by Dean's promise,  now all she sees is his squandered potential.  And what does Dean see? He sees the woman he met and fell in love with. But he doesn't see himself.  It's not that they have grown apart, rather, neither seems to have grown at all. But the fog of love has lifted for Cindy. 


Back and forth in time we go, the beginning and what seems to be the end.  The courtship, the rush of  new young love is tender and sweet and believable. Blue Valentine will bring you back to that first encompassing love. The one where you had your own song, and your own shorthand language. You might also have had blinders on. Then back to the ruins that is Cindy and Dean's marriage, beautiful in it's own quiet way; what is unsaid is sometimes more important that what is spoken, and a dim hopeful flicker of this husband and wife's past occasionally shines through. That they've become so dreary and faded in such a short stretch of time seems implausible. The sharp decline of Dean's hairline in 6 years is in direct proportion to the relationship. They can't be more than thirty years or so,  yet one would think that decades have passed.  


My one minor complaint with Blue Valentine is that all the marital erosion has occurred off-screen and the audience is left with the aftermath.  There's a missing link. We've gone from 60 to 0, but an important chunk in the middle - full of blood sweat and tears no doubt - is unaccounted for.  Cindy's present day detachment seems unwarranted, and Dean is such a lovable lug and attentive father, surely Cindy's the one with the problem.  It creates a sort of villain of Cindy.  In the lobby after the film I hear two variations of the same theme.  "I don't get it?  He (Dean) is like perfect... well accept for that he drinks. What's wrong with her?" And this comment is made independently by both a man and a woman.  It's unfortunate and unfair but understandable.


Film maker Derek Cianfrance has an eye for the remarkable in the mundane.  His credits as a documentary film maker have served him well here. Blue Valentine has an intimacy and integrity that made me uncomfortable at times.  There's a tension that continually casts a pall over Cindy and Dean. Whether it's who's to blame for the family's lost dog, the way daughter Frankie eats her oatmeal, or a refusal of a sexual interaction, the recriminations are rarely spoken but deeply felt by them and us. It's just like real life. No one breaks out in monologue to fill in the subtext, but the film is heavy and rich with it.

Cindy and Dean are dimensional and sympathetic due to the soul-bearing performances of the leads. Williams and Gossling are compelling actors. They disappear into Dean and Cindy's marriage completely;  any vanity these actors may have been holding on to is left behind. The appeal of  Williams and Gossling is so much more than physical.  This couple has been through the emotional wringer and it shows. I've read that the film is a combination of script and improvisation; it's a supremely successful pairing.  And that's not an easy admission as a believer in the power and sanctity of the writer's words as written. 


Near film's end I find myself wanting a mindless rom-com ending. I care about these people. They deserve a little more happiness. But it's not that kind of a film.  That's not to say that Blue Valentine is a downer. It's surprisingly funny in a real world way, and if there's no happy ending, at least there's a pearl of hope. Next time I watch "Spice Up My Kitchen" I think I'll see what happens in the middle. Magical transformations good or bad, don't exist without the in between.