THE MOOD in Blue Valentine is like the Dave Alvin song “Fourth of July” set to film. It’s July 3 for a working couple in Scranton, Pa.: Cindy (Michelle Williams) is a nurse married to Dean (Ryan Gosling), a house painter, who wakes up in his clothes in the living room to find out the family dog is missing.
The parents get their 5-year-old daughter (Faith Wladyka) fed and taken to school while trying not to fight. That evening, Dean has a bad idea: the two of them will head for one of those honeymoon-themed motels in the Poconos for a romantic getaway.
As they travel, there are flashbacks showing us the way they met some five or six years previously. Dean was once an aimless kid, working at a moving-van company in Brooklyn. On a job in Pennsylvania, he has a chance encounter with Cindy. She was, at the time, a pre-med student involved with a real alpha-male type named Bobby (Mike Vogel). Dean decides that she is his destiny, love at first sight.
And now, they have been married for five years. “Welcome to the future,” Dean says as they settle down to some serious vodka drinking. Cindy and Dean, on edge already, spend the night in a space-ship-themed vacation room with steel walls, a glowing console and a round rotating bed. The memories come back unbidden, all the way to the hung-over dawn.
Blue Valentine‘s biggest problem is common to films that have been slaved over for a decade, as this one was. Some of the details are still in director Derek Cianfrace’s head. The movie’s shifts of time grind, even with matching shots: the lacy green roadside weeds giving way to a bunch of flowers brought for the first meeting with Cindy’s parents.
We keep asking: Where are we in the story now? We stay disoriented, despite Dean’s drastic change of look: as a married man, he has more stubble, less hair, Elvis glasses and a truck-stop T-shirt with an American eagle profile on it. Having left New York City, Dean apparently decided to start playing a hick, and he’s a ringer for Jason Lee in My Name Is Earl.
The performances on the outer rings of the film aren’t as dense as Gosling and Williams’ searching explorations of a troubled marriage. Sylvia Sidney look-alike Jen Jones is memorable as Cindy’s grandmother. Ben Shenkman, playing the physician who is Cindy’s boss, needed about three times as much screen time as he got to develop his motives as a character; the reveal of the latter is far too blatant.
That said, Blue Valentine‘s main point of view belongs to Cindy, who as the dissatisfied party takes over the film. She wants out of the marriage even as Dean clings to it; cinema always favors the moving over the still. Dean believes he’s made it in life: he gets to drink beer on the job.
What we start to see, because of Williams’ acting, is something bigger than this couple’s feud, something more like the war of the body and the soul. The film writers have fixated on Williams’ body, and that’s OK because it popularizes an important tragic film. But there’s nothing yielding, teasing or popularly erotic about the way Cindy handles Dean’s need for intimacy.
So Gosling has tough work as an actor, portraying this man watching the love of his life slip away; his Dean can be childish, or childishly debonair, calling his seething wife a “saucy little minx” as if that’ll sweeten her temper. He’s insistent, but so is a drowning person. More than anything, Blue Valentine makes it clear what a terrible thing “romantic destiny” would be if it really existed.
Problem-wracked as it is, Blue Valentine is one of the most ambitious films of the year. As for Williams: Wendy and Lucy suggested that she had something deep inside her, something that reflects and sometimes improves on classic work by Ingrid Bergman and Marilyn Monroe (whom she’ll be playing soon). She simply gives the single best female performance of the year.
R; 114 min.
