Dean is a high school dropout from a broken home. Cindy is a nurse from a home that should be broken. Frankie, their daughter, is in danger of losing hers because the love that bound Dean and Cindy no longer exists. In its place: anger.
This is the platform of Blue Valentine, a fine, powerfully sad film from director Derek Cianfrance. Ryan Gosling plays Dean, a specialist in, if not a master of, psychological defense. Michelle Williams is Cindy, his professionally successful and emotionally more sophisticated – and vulnerable and, perhaps, calculating – wife. Faith Wladyka is the winsome Frankie, a precocious mistress of loss.
The movie crosscuts time frames, contrasting the deterioration of the marriage with brighter scenes of courtship and a pastel, happy wedding. There are three key sequences. In the first, Dean and Cindy romance each other on a commuter train in the New Jersey area. The second, protracted and painful, takes place in the Future Room in a love hotel to which this decidedly contemporary and uneven couple has repaired to see whether they can save their marriage. The third is in the hospital where Cindy has gone to handle an emergency, leaving Dean in a drunken stupor in the love hotel. It is there, when he catches up with her, that Dean finally explodes.
In this enervating film, hospitals are not healing destinations. Neither are most other places, though the assisted living facility where Dean, who works for a moving company, helps an old man rearrange his final possessions and Cindy takes care of her grandmother offers a kind of relief. Cianfrance suggests age brings not only weariness but also peace. The assisted living facility scenes – that’s where Dean first sees Cindy – are the closest this film comes to upbeat.
While the three key sequences are the most freighted, some briefer ones are equally dramatic, like one in which Cindy’s jealous boyfriend (who got her pregnant, paving the way for Dean, the unwitting and problematic savior) and two fellow goons beat up Dean, and numerous sex passages that underline what has helped keep Dean and Cindy together.
Gosling, tattooed and scruffily bearded, a filter cigarette always in his mouth, is a sensual fit for the slim, boyish Williams. Their sex is electric, the trust behind its abandon hard to imagine. (Work on this movie was postponed in 2008 so Williams could grieve the death of her lover, the actor Heath Ledger; the couple had a child.)
Loss brackets the movie. What rages in between is the sound of a marriage falling apart.
After they leave Frankie with Cindy’s loveless parents, they have to face each other. “We have to get out of this house,” Dean tells Cindy. “Let’s go get drunk and make love.” He suggests the Future Room, she initially resists but ultimately gives in. In the liquor store where Cindy is stocking up, she runs into the man who impregnated her.
He ogles her. He says he missed out by not marrying her. He asks whether she’s been faithful. She says yes. On their way to the love hotel, Cindy and Dean argue. When they arrive, they get hammered, romp in the rotating bed, slow dance, and make love. Yet they’re still only going through the motions. [Photo by Davi Russo / The Weinstein Company]
As Dean turns up the volume, Cindy becomes more brittle, and their alcohol codependence loses its efficacy. The texture of Blue Valentine occasionally evokes the harrowing, lonelier Leaving Las Vegas, still Nicolas Cage’s finest moment, though alcoholism doesn’t define Dean (Gosling has a Cage-like gauntness) as it does Ben Anderson, Cage’s pickled screenwriter. Both movies are emotionally draining.
The superb cinematography by Andrij Parekh is so heavy on close-up, viewers might feel like they’re sitting on the characters’ shoulders. That closeness keeps the tension high, the drama tight. It also puts the viewer into an intimate relationship with a movie small in ensemble yet large in expressiveness. Cianfrance’s screenplay is terse and credible, too.
But what carries Blue Valentine is the acting. It’s clear why Michelle Williams got a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her Cindy. It’s unfair that Ryan Gosling didn’t nab a Best Actor nomination for his Dean. Both own their unforgettable, devastating parts.
