Blue Valentine

Blue Valentine tells the story of Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) and the exhaustion of love in marriage. Executive produced by Gosling and Williams, it is an economical but striking portrait of the inherently flawed nature of human relationships and the failure of love to conquer all.

We first meet Cindy and Dean in the present, when she is working as a nurse and he as a house painter, then we flashback to their first meeting and the early days of their romance. Throughout the film, Cianfrance cuts back and forth between these two periods, showing us on the one hand the present and their rapidly disintegrating relationship and on the other contrasting it with the happier times when they were in love with each other.

The script, co-written by the director, doesn’t chart how things went wrong but gives us enough to fill in the gaps. Whereas Dean is happy enough with his routine existence, Cindy is frustrated by her lack of achievement (she once harboured a dream of doing medicine) and perhaps is regretful of having accidentally fallen pregnant to Dean on their first date. We also get some insight into Cindy’s upbringing in a home dominated by her intimidating father (John Doman).

In both time periods Cianfrance keeps the camera close to his subjects, the absence of a clearly-defined context making it difficult at first to understand what is going on.  The technique however pays off as it keeps us intensely involved with the characters. Virtually on screen for the entire running time Gosling and Williams are superb, capturing the innocence and trust of the courtship days and the estrangement of the later years (some mention should be made here of the make-up department who do a first-class job of aging the actors, Gosling in particular) in completely convincing performances.

Whilst acknowledging that Blue Valentine is a quite pessimistic film I had only one quibble and that is with a piece of text that appears in the end credits and asks “Is this you?”. If this is to be taken at face value it seems to be an at-best gratuitous, at worst smug, inclusion in what is otherwise a well-judged film.

 

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