Susan Granger’s review of “Blue Valentine” (The Weinstein Company)
Spanning the course of six years, this is an intense, extraordinarily intimate, convoluted depiction of a tumultuous, yet doomed relationship.
Cutting back and forth between the end the beginning of a romance, it introduces Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling), who are married and living in Brooklyn with a kindergarten-age daughter named Frankie. When the family dog is accidentally killed, they decide to ship Frankie off overnight so they can bury the pet and figure out how to tell the child.
Diligent Cindy works hard as a nurse in a physician’s office, while Dean’s an underachieving moving-man/house-painter. She’s subtly reserved. He oozes a twitchy, brash physicality. They’re overtly confrontational about their sexual attraction and their differences, particularly when Dean decides to celebrate this night ‘off’ from parenthood by cashing in a gift certificate for a blue-toned, future-themed motel room, urging, “C’mon, let’s get drunk and make love.”
As Cindy wonders, “Do feelings just disappear” her grandmother warns, “You gotta be careful that the person you fall in love with is worth it.”
Writer/director Derek Cianfrance deliberately scheduled filming scenes of the idyllic beginning of the relationship first, using a hand-held camera to capture when it was fun and alive, encouraging his actors to embody their characters, emphasizing that – in real life – sex is messy, and he wanted to delve into that messiness. Cianfrance also chose to utilize the ‘present’ in high-definition video and the ‘past’ on Super 16-millimeter. As a result, this is an acting vehicle in that the naturalistic individual performances are emotionally challenging, but the concept, as a whole, doesn’t work, even though it played successfully at Sundance and Cannes, garnering notoriety with an NC-17 rating, which subsequently was changed to an R.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Blue Valentine” is a brutally grim, tortuously overwrought, depressing 6. It’s the kind of movie that actors relish but most audience members may find themselves anxiously looking for the EXIT sign, glancing at their watches, waiting for the excruciating two hours to go by.
