Some films are easier to sell to a mainstream audience than others. Romantic comedies are generally considered safe ground for a film studio with their warm, light, fluffy story lines and happy endings making them easy to market. Blue Valentine certainly isn’t a romantic comedy. And neither is it an easy watch. It is however a raw, emotionally powerful (and often emotionally draining) dissection of a marriage staring Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling.
The film follows a non linear narrative, jumping in time between the start of their relationship and it’s ultimate demise with brutal honesty and lack of Hollywood gloss. It is a slow burning and unrelenting journey into the world of two people who see their views on love and on one another change as the film progresses.
Blue Valentine - A modern reworking of Scenes From A Marriage (1973)
Blue Valentine owes much in style and content to Ingmar Burgman’s 1973 work Scenes From A Marriage. They share a similar uncompromising look at love. And the intensity that both movies aim for between their main characters lead to some of the most uncomfortable scenes ever captured on film. The scenes are slow burning and unrelenting and remind you of the power that is available from a scene that shows two people falling out of love. Like Burgman at his best Blue Valentine isn’t afraid to risk alienating it’s audience in order to delve deeper into the lives of the two main characters. The film is also reminiscent of the 2006 Australian film Candy which looked at the break up of a relationship but through the eyes of two drug addicts. Though in Blue Valentine there is nothing as remarkable as drug addiction to separate and destroy a young couple in love, instead that is left to unravel by its self.
Blue Valentine’s real trump card is the actors and their ability to convey so much using so little. Throughout the film it is often the moments with little or no dialogue that are the most effecting for the viewer. For added realism and a deeper connection between the two actors Derek Cianfrance, the director of Blue Valentine, rented a house together for them and instructed them to live together as if they were a true couple.
Derek Cianfrance tries to play the film as straight down the middle as possible with both characters shown as flawed individuals who shared a love for each which is now dying. And it’s because that they are both flawed that the film works. Gosling’s character Dean is the romantic of the two but he is someone who lacks ambition and decides to go after a job painting houses as it’s an easy lifestyle that allows him to drink at work and save all his energy for their daughter.
“I didn’t want to be somebody’s husband and I didn’t want to be somebody’s dad, that wasn’t my goal in life. But somehow it was. I work so I can do that.”
William’s character Cindy is the hard working nurse who is the bread winner of the household and also the emotionally colder character of the two. She is fed up with her husband drunken state and having to be the bad guy with their daughter in order to keep some sort of order in the house. It would have been easy for the film to pick sides but it’s to Cianfrance’s credit that he holds it together in an even handed manner so well.
The film has been criticized by some for lacking pace and for not being clear on the pitfalls that ultimately break the couple up. But that is indeed the point of the film. You can’t always pinpoint the moment when a couple starts to drift apart. Blue Valentine is indeed a hard watch, but it’s a good film because of that. By the final scene you might wish you hadn’t just sat through such a heartbreaking examination of a couple and surely that’s the biggest compliment you can pay the film?
*Please note this review is taken from a previous Tumblr account I set up to publish reviews for my university course "Cinema and Society"*
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