There aren’t all that many places that relationship dramas can go. Generally they’re a case of seen one, seen them all. The conceit that Blue Valentine uses, that of juxtaposing scenes of a couple falling in love with scenes of the same couple falling out of love, is meant to freshen things up a bit; but even this is a gimmick that I’ve seen used a couple of times now. When it comes down to it, the only way to make your relationship drama stand out from the crowd is with quality. A good script, good performances, and inspired direction can go a long way toward invigorating a tired premise. Blue Valentine hedges it’s bets by going not just for the gimmick but also for the quality, and ends up setting itself apart nicely. One side note: this is often a bleak, hard to watch film about sad people who are at the lowest point in their lives. I’m not talking about freak show, Requiem for a Dream type lowest point. This is subtler, good people who never lived up to their potential type stuff. Two people who should have been happy together forever are now in a loveless marriage and it’s not so much anybody’s fault as it is just the way things are. In many ways watching this more common, mundane failure gets under your skin much more than sawed off limbs and A to A. We are first introduced to a bloated, dark circled, work clothed couple who have a young daughter, and then we meet their younger, fitter, bright eyed counterparts; before life beat them to a pulp. Back and forth the two couple’s stories play out in front of us. This film is Back to the Future if there was no Marty character to go back in time and fix his parents’ lives.
The relationship that this film creates and destroys is between the characters of Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams). When we meet the married couple it is, at first, hard to imagine how the two of them would have ever gotten together. Dean is goofy and childish. He doesn’t seem to want to do much other than drink and play with their daughter. Cindy is uptight, pragmatic, and very career oriented. Add in the ominous portent that the film starts with the family dog going missing and it doesn’t take much detective work to figure out that this is a marriage on it’s way to being over. When we start to get scenes of the couple in their early twenties the exact opposite suddenly becomes true. Cindy comes from a fractured household full of emotional abuse. She has the typical jock boyfriend (who is delightfully named Bobby Ontario, maybe the best name for a meathead ex-boyfriend that I’ve ever heard) who is kind of a jerk and doesn’t seem to be treating her right. The only comfort and connection that she has when we meet her is in the relationship she has with her ailing grandmother. Young Dean is a lost soul, but one that seems perfectly content with aimless wandering. He is whimsical, romantic, and openhearted. Like William H Macy’s character in Magnolia he is a man with a lot of love to give and nowhere to put it. It’s not hard to imagine how a guy like this might feel like such a breath of fresh air to Cindy. And it’s not hard to imagine why Dean would be drawn to a smart, pretty girl like her. When the two of them start to come together, and we watch them relishing in the pure joy of having found each other, it’s terribly hard to imagine how they could ever become the distant, closed off couple that we are first introduced to.
Blue Valentine is mostly an acting showcase, and Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams’ performances are the things that are going to make or break the film. What we get from them are two great, but very distinct performances that come from two very different approaches to acting. Gosling plays his character as quirky and full of ticks. His depiction of Dean is a mix of Woody Allen neurosis, Hunter S Thompson yelps and erratic gesturing, and Nick from the show Family Ties. The young version of the character often walks around with his hood up, carrying a ukulele. The older one is badly balding, but hasn’t thrown in the towel and shaved his hair close. He wears big, ridiculous glasses and paint splattered togs. He is perpetually surrounded in a grotesque cloud of cigarette smoke. When it comes time to pull off the emotional and dramatic moments Gosling rises to the occasion and performs elegantly, but for much of the film we watch him show off. This is Gosling doing Depp. It’s him creating a unique, out there character just for the sake of doing it. Williams’ performance is pretty much the exact opposite. She is very understated and minimalist. She doesn’t always show all of her cards when it comes to what Cindy is feeling, letting only a small expression slip here and there to give us clues. The younger version of the character looks and acts like a college girl that you probably know; the older looks and acts like a young mother/medical professional that you probably know as well. In Williams’ hands Cindy is completely authentic. It’s hard to tell that she is acting at all.
Often times it starts to feel like the two actors are performing in different films and I wanted to take the director to task for not getting them in sync. But then I started to wonder how much of the two different approaches could be intentional. I had read that Derek Cianfrance created a pretty immersive environment for his actors to work in. He lived in a house with Gosling, Williams, and the little girl who plays their daughter for quite a while; trying to get them to a place where their interactions would be second nature so they would feel like a real family on screen. When you watch that little girl (Faith Wladyka) eat breakfast with the two principles it’s clear that this approach had to work. The six year old seems to be completely unaware of the cameras and the fact that she is acting. I couldn’t figure out how much of what she was saying was scripted and how much was just natural reactions to Gosling messing around with her and trying to create moments. Could this same environment have fostered performances from Gosling and Williams that weren’t gelling with each other? I doubt it. A large part of what the film focuses on is the fact that the two main characters are people who are no longer on the same page. Over the span of six years Dean and Cindy have managed to grow so far apart that they’re completely different people. The opposite ways that Gosling and Williams approach their performances helps give you a visceral understanding of why these two can no longer go on living together and being married. Their being together just no longer works.
It’s clear throughout most of the film that Cindy is the one who is no longer in love. She is still playing the role of the wife and mother, but just for the sake of her daughter, not out of any remaining feeling for Dean. I was worried during the first act of the film that this structure would lead to Cindy feeling like little more than an ungrateful shrew. She’s a career driven woman, and Dean is content with being nothing more than a husband and a father. This dynamic is hard to play out without making Cindy the bad guy. Why can’t she be happy with what she has? How can she be so cold to a man who still loves her and treats her well? The strengths of the two actors somehow manage to keep this from being the case. Williams is able to inject enough vulnerability into a frustrated character to keep her from being an annoyance. And Gosling is able to make a charismatic, devil-may-care character grate on your nerves just enough to keep you from being on his side, but without making Dean the bad guy either. When the couple were young Dean’s goofy songs, silly games, and grand romantic gestures were too good to be true for a warmth and affection starved Cindy, but over the years the very qualities that first drew her to Dean have now made him impossible to suffer. Cindy is always making cracks about how she already has one kid and doesn’t need two, and at first it seems like a harsh criticism, but the further you get into the film the more you begin to agree with her. When the tragic fate of the family dog is revealed Dean spends the night watching sappy videos of their daughter playing with it. He drinks and cries, indulging in the emotion of the situation. He wallows and whines like a child. An adult doesn’t behave this way; an adult does what he can to push the situation out of his mind and deal. When bad things happen, it’s Cindy who has to shoulder all of the weight of the consequences. When we first meet Dean he’s hung-over and rough looking, but he quickly pushes that aside and plays with his daughter when she needs attention. Despite his darker side, he seems to be at least a good father. But when we see him alone with his wife he is still drunk, and he’s still trying to play the goofy games that he does with his six-year-old daughter. Any time Cindy tries to steer things toward more adult conversation he gets defensive and undercuts things with more absurdity. When they were young and first getting to know each other Dean seemed fun and spontaneous, but after six years of it Cindy is in desperate need of some adult time. That’s what you get when you let yourself get romanced by a ukulele-playing hipster, if only she had known better. Ah, the folly of youth.
Never is the division between the two characters more painfully and awkwardly apparent as when they try to have sex. Cindy is to the point where she absolutely loathes being around Dean, and is clearly upset when he tries to touch her. Unfortunately for us, Dean is slow to realize just how bad things have gotten, and we’re forced to watch him face awkward rejection after awkward rejection. Sex scenes are uncomfortable enough to watch already, and most of the time I find them to be completely extraneous and gratuitous. They’re always soft lit, and slow motion, and aim to accomplish nothing other than letting us know that the two participants have good sex (oh yeah!). Often creepy, overly cinematic love scenes get played out over the course of several minutes when a simple image of two bodies falling onto a bed and a cut to some cigarette smoking would do the trick. That isn’t the case with the sex scenes we get in this movie. Here, the particulars of the sex acts are important and necessary. Seeing how Dean and Cindy are interacting sexually is a revealing reflection of their internal struggles and where their relationship is headed. Originally the film was given an NC-17 rating, but after the producers pitched a fit the MPAA agreed to drop that down to an R without anything having to be cut. And not cutting anything was essential, because the scenes deemed questionable are very big moments in the film. And the original, harsher rating doesn’t seem to me to have stemmed from any sort of explicit content at all. No more is shown or done in this film than in countless other R rated films that I’ve seen. The only difference is in how the sex is presented. Here we don’t get candlelight, and slow motion shots lingering over the curves of bodies. The way the sex scenes are shot here is very straightforward and documentary. And the sex the characters are having isn’t movie sex; it’s very pragmatic and very real. It looks a lot less like sex you would see on the big screen and much more like sex you would see if you walked into a room at the wrong moment. For me, this approach is less awkward than slow motion and sax music, and I felt more comfortable watching this than I do watching most movie sex scenes; but I think the MPAA was made uncomfortable by change. This wasn’t what they were used to, so surely it must be bad. The scenes in question are two depictions of oral sex; one performed on Cindy when she is young and happy, and one performed on her when she is older and miserable. During the first one her pleasure mixes with joy so overwhelmingly that moans give way to delirious laughter. The second one doesn’t work out so well. It starts with squirming, turns to shoving, and ends in angry yelling. Watching the married couple repeatedly try to have sex that doesn’t work out is humiliating and uncomfortable, and this second oral scene is the dramatic climax of the film in my mind. Cutting either of these scenes out would have been impossible. But, oh man, is that second scene hard to get through. If you would have told me six months ago that Greenberg wouldn’t have the most awkward failed cunnilingus scene of 2010 I would have though you were an insane person. But here it is, proof. Watching these two characters fall out of love is fascinating and impactful, but it is absolutely, in no way, date movie material.
But I don’t want to make it sound like watching Blue Valentine is an unpleasant experience. As bleak a situation as watching a married couple separate is, I was amazed at how much humor was injected throughout. Some of it just comes from the fact that Dean and Cindy are fun, likable people, and some of it takes place during the film’s darkest moments. Pain gets so palpable that it turns to pleasure. A lot of this film’s humor is so dark that it’s black. There were several moments when horrible things were taking place and I found myself giggling in the back of the theater. I was impressed with how deftly the switch from tragedy to comedy and back again was made. Usually films that try this end up messy with uneven tones, but Blue Valentine manages to take you on a ride while still holding itself together as a whole. And the humor isn’t the only thing keeping the audience from slitting their wrists. For all the bleak realism employed in the depiction of the crumbling relationship, this is still a film that takes place in a world where a school play is shown and everyone’s kid is skinny and cute. On its surface this film is gritty and independent, but some soothing movie magic creeps in here and there. The camera work is all handheld and immediate. It gives off an air of being loosely handled, documentary, and intimate. But at the same time there is crafted, slick, visual flourish going on with the film’s color design. In the past, when love is blossoming, the colors are warm and glowing. In the present where the relationship is ending we get icy blues and grays. This isn’t just a throwaway, indie breakup movie. This is a deftly made, intricate production that is well worth anyone’s time, even despite the uncomfortable moments. Second to the performances, what impressed me the most about this one was probably the writing. The dual, weaving storylines both build and reach their climaxes at the exact same moment. We watch the couple’s wedding side to side with the moment where they separate, and it all worked smoothly and felt completely natural. It’s a sign of good writing that I didn’t see the dual climax coming. Getting to that same moment in structure with two stories without noticeably speeding one of the stories up or slowing the other down must have taken a lot of planning and rewrites in order to work as good as it does here. Blue Valentine makes it seem effortless. Talent and quality sets this film apart from the pack, and it’s one of my favorites of the year.
