Blue Valentine (2011)

Earlier this week, a friend of mine who has a penchant for asking such things, posited the question: can love ever really die? Had I seen it then, I would’ve sent her to watch Blue Valentine.

It tells the story of a married couple, parents of a five-year-old daughter, whose love is at death’s door. As the film opens, you see that Dean (Ryan Gosling) is a devoted husband and father and a freelance house painter, with a receding hairline and childish ways. His wife Cindy (Michelle Williams), meanwhile, is an equally devoted mother with a full time job as a nurse. The two live together but barely speak. We quickly learn why. Every conversation, including one where Cindy tells Dean she bumped into an old flame named Bobby (Mike Vogel), turns into an argument. It’s clear that there is a deep well of hurt and resentment in their six-year relationship.

The film then flashes back to the couple’s better days when Dean was just a romantic with a job as a mover–and significantly more hair–who longed to discover love at first sight. He finds it in Cindy, who he meets at a retirement home where she spends time visiting her ailing grandmother. At one point in their courtship, he plays his ukulele while singing Elvis Presley and she tap dances in the street. It’s a sweet and awkward beginning that is rushed along by an unexpected pregnancy and their need to grow up too quickly.

Director Derek Cianfrance switches back and forth between the beginning and the end of Cindy and Dean’s story to paint the picture of the deteriorated romance. It’s like a melancholy 500 Days of Summer, only here a Red Digital camera captures every unpleasant aspect of the couple’s messy lives in grainy, high-resolution, hyper-realistic detail. When he flashes back, Cianfrance shoots on film and all of the colors look brighter and the hard edges softer. It’s an on-the-nose metaphor, but one that works nonetheless.

What might not work for some viewers is the way that Blue Valentine’s story, as penned by Cianfrance, Joey Curtis, and Cami Delavigne seems to have a beginning and end, but no middle. How does Dean go from the dopey, big-hearted mensch who put stars in Cindy’s eyes to someone she can no longer stand to look at, let alone make love to? Is he really all that different or is it just the way she sees him that’s changed? The thin, wispy script provides few clues.

It’s frustrating that there isn’t more meat on the script’s bare bones, but I suspect that the filmmakers did that intentionally, wanting audiences to supply the middle for themselves. As someone who has had the pain of experiencing love’s disappearing act, I know that the traits one loves the most in the beginning can be maddening eventually.

In my interpretation, Dean’s impulsive nature and always putting Cindy first morphed from loving devotion into childish lack of ambition in her eyes. Meaning well and doing well are two different things. Others might point to Dean’s high-functioning alcoholism as the root of the problem. Some might argue that love forged under duress, as theirs is, is not really love. Some might even lay the blame squarely on Cindy’s uncommunicative, ice-queen shoulders. In that way, Blue Valentine is like a choose-your-own-adventure film, although it’s not so much an adventure as it is a brooding, emotionally draining dirge.

Gosling and Williams do a superb job of bringing these characters to life. Each slides back and forth from attractive and exuberant to harried and wounded with an impressive ease. Each performance is so raw and so real, particularly in the sex scene that nearly earned the film an NC-17 rating, that it caused an actual, physical ache in me. Of the two actors, Williams has the wider emotional chasm to cross. Even faced with flat dialogue the likes of “I can’t do this anymore,” she manages to flesh out a character that is simultaneously exhausted and exhausting.

I’m not spoiling anything by saying that this is not a date movie, certainly not one of the “kiss and make up, happily ever after” variety. This film is brilliantly acted and well directed, but it’s also incredibly hard to watch. To answer my friend’s question of the week: Yes, Virginia, love does die. But Blue Valentine will live with you for a while.