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BLUE VALENTINE (2010): Anti-Notebook

December 8th 2010 12:36

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Blue Valentine Poster Michelle Williams Ryan Gosling

Blue Valentine is a second feature drama (after Brother Tied) directed and co-written by Derek Cianfrance, starring Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling. It is a heartbreaking and emotionally draining – for both the actors and the viewers – story of the disintegration of romantic love. I repeat: not a date movie. Decidedly not a feel-good movie either. In fact, a fellow audience member audibly summed it up thusly upon exiting the cinema: “ghastly.” Gosling, famous for his engaging portrayals of complex and vulnerable young men in such audience favourites as The Notebook and The Real Girl, delivers a strong if less appealing performance as Dean, a sensitive and creative high school drop-out, who grew up in a broken home, abandoned by his mother after she left his janitor/musician father. So Dean became a romantic giver with low self-esteem issues, wanting to find his one and only. Michelle Williams (Dawson’s Creek, Wendy and Lucy) is the attractive and troubled Cindy, notoriously unable to express her feelings or needs, while stumbling from lover to lover in an attempt to find someone who will just “get” her. Her family is dysfunctional too, of course, with an abusive father and a mother in permanent victim-mode.

Blue Valentine Michelle Williams Ryan Gosling

Happy Together: Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine (2010)

The talented actors do engage emotionally with their characters, each other and the audience, but are trapped in a rather ruthless screenplay, which leaves one a little cold. The hollow feeling might stem from the fact that we are shown the budding romance intermittently intercut with the disintegration of the relationship in its final stages, yet no “middle years.” The old adage “you cannot live on love alone” may be true, but here it plays like an exercise in style.

Dean and Cindy’s relationship gets out of balance, with one person giving so much of themselves they get lost and increasingly insecure, while the other takes, gets frustrated and then disengages because they lack self-awareness and introspection to figure out and much less communicate their feelings, never mind trying to realise them. It is difficult to empathise with this couple, because as in Revolutionary Road you just wanna shake ‘em out of their sheer emotional dumbness.

In conclusion, on one level the two characters receive the gift of true romantic connection only to dismantle it piece by piece because they don’t know any better, and on another level a filmmaker is given an expensive toy after an impressive debut and ends up making a slightly exploitative, bitter and not fully processed story out of it. Comparisons to Brokeback Mountain come to mind, possibly because of Michelle Williams who is stuck in a marriage that cannot work there and also Gosling, who is reminiscent of Heath Ledger’s intensity on screen. Blue Valentine cannot compare to the emotional truth so effectively expressed in that film, but what is devastating here, is that both the marriage and the film could both have worked much better with a little more know-how, of the non-technical kind. Is it ghastly? In a way only cinematic emotional vomit can be.

Review by Patricia Bieszk

Copyright P. Bieszk 2010

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