Derek Cianfrance (2010)
It begins with a child’s voice calling for a lost dog. Within a few minutes, we can see that the love between Cindy, the child’s mother, and her husband Dean, who’s not the girl’s biological father, has also gone missing and won’t come back. The symbolism is undeniably obvious; yet her parents’ conversation with five-year-old Frankie about the dog and the search for it are so quickly absorbing and upsetting (the animal has been knocked down and killed on a freeway) that the writer-director Derek Cianfrance alchemises his facile metaphor. Blue Valentine is a description of a marriage falling apart. It’s not especially insightful or even thought-provoking but it is an intense and a gripping description. This is a film where you get so tied up with the two main characters that you stop wondering what will happen next; you live their experiences with them, as you partake of the lives of people close to you – except that you may also be counting yourself lucky that your life isn’t usually as gruellingly unhappy as Dean’s and Cindy‘s. Cianfrance cuts between the couple’s present and past: except for Ryan Gosling’s change of haircut, things don’t look much different. But the emotional gulf between their getting-to-love-you days and the hollowed-out present tense is devastating. The courtship includes perhaps the most charming scene of any film of 2010, when Dean, on a ukulele, serenades Cindy with, and she dances to, ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’. Again, the choice of song is too neatly apt but the rendition is irresistible. Dean explains that, in order to sing at all, ‘I have to sing goofy’, which is believable and eccentrically touching. Cindy doesn’t, technically speaking, dance well. Yet his singing and her dancing are both wonderful.
This is the third performance I’ve seen from Ryan Gosling, who’s able to suggest very different kinds of intelligence effortlessly, and the limits of his characters’ emotional intelligence empathically. It’s both outrageous and poignant when Dean, who often flies off the handle, insists to Cindy that things can’t be that bad because he isn’t violent towards her (although he comes perilously close at times). Gosling’s line readings have incredible wit. Dean accuses Cindy of wanting him to be something he isn’t – professionally successful, maybe other things too. He’s right and she knows it: it’s a real strength of Michelle Williams’s acting here that her disappointment communicates itself as much in the spaces between words as in the words themselves. Williams makes the breakthrough into being the actress her supporting role in Brokeback Mountain promised she might be. Cindy rarely smiles (when she tells Dean a joke about a paedophile it’s startling in more ways than one); Williams has to show the gradings of her character’s moods within a more limited emotional range than Gosling, and she does it impressively. Cindy, a nurse whose businesslike manner with her parents seems a form of self-protection, really hardens in the course of Blue Valentine. Faith Wladyka is very affecting as Frankie, who’s old enough to know something’s wrong but not old enough to understand what.
In the middle of the film – chronologically and substantially – the couple stays overnight in a motel. Each of the rooms is themed: ‘Cupid’s Cove’, ‘The Atlantis Room’, and so on. Dean, whose idea this love-rekindling one-night-stand is, chooses ‘The Future’. It sounds, like the calling for the lost dog, weakly symbolic, and pat. Here too, though, the detail is transforming and the ensuing action is compelling. The room is described as ‘like we’re inside a robot’s vagina’. The couple’s aggressive sex makes it not just like old times but expresses what’s desperate and going wrong between them. The breakdown of the relationship between Dean and Cindy is powerful because no one’s unequivocally to blame and this makes you feel helpless. The larger view of marriage that the film presents is dispiriting in a different way because it’s imposed, merely asserted. Cindy’s parents have an evidently unhappy relationship. Her widowed grandmother tells Cindy that married life wasn’t up to much for her either. This admission of evidence for the prosecution is a weakness in Cianfrance’s screenplay. Elsewhere, though, and apart from a few bits of improvisation that feel forced, this script contains some of the best naturalistic dialogue – in the couple’s rows, their growing intimacy, their getting drunk together – heard in American films of the last year or two. I think the final sequence, as Dean walks away from Cindy and Frankie, into a night lit up by fireworks in a celebration happening somewhere else, will stay in my mind.
17 January 2011
