Blue Valentine (2010)

USA, 112 minutes

Director: Derek Cianfrance

Writers: Derek Cianfrance, Joey Curtis, Cami Delavigne

Photography: Andrij Parekh

Music: Grizzly Bear, Penny & the Quarters

Editors: Jim Helton, Ron Patane

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams, Faith Wladyka, John Doman, Mike Vogel, Maryann Plunkett, Ben Shenkman

I remembered Blue Valentine earlier this year when I was looking at Marriage Story. They're both heartbreaking tales of 30something splits, with young kid, they're both set in New York City—I had forgotten that about Blue Valentine—and they're both honest to a fault on relationships breaking down. The biggest difference may be in the class positions of their principals. Marriage Story takes place in Manhattan (and Los Angeles) and features a MacArthur Fellowship recipient whereas Blue Valentine is set in Brooklyn, and not really the trendy gentrified Brooklyn of the past 15 years, but a deeper layer, where alcoholism and domestic violence are hardly uncommon and not everybody finishes high school but can always get by at day labor.

Michelle Williams as Cindy and Ryan Gosling as Dean are the real strength of Blue Valentine—it's literally their vehicle as they've even got skin in among the phalanx of executive producers. They're much more accomplished and simply better than Scarlett Johansson (who is nonetheless very good in Marriage Story) and Adam Driver. Blue Valentine director and cowriter Derek Gianfrance may not have the resume or filmmaking skills of Marriage Story director Noah Baumbach but he can stay out of the way of his formidable stars. Baumbach may have made a better film, as such, but Gianfrance has made the more memorable one, taking pages out of the John Cassavettes style, with actors so deeply committed to their roles that therapy seems a likely result of the trauma of making the picture. Blue Valentine has little nudity or violence but is so intensely bleak it earned an NC-17 rating the first time around.

Many of its scenes were improvised, wholly or in part, and Gianfrance is one of those directors who's often happy with first takes and ready to move on. The confidence of this style brings its own bravura. It's raw on many levels, operating all on instinct. When Cindy tells a joke, it's about a child molester in the woods ("You think you're scared, kid? I gotta walk outta here alone"). It's even raw formally as Gianfrance's cinematographer, Andrij Parekh, is set free to pursue the liberated handheld camera throughout. I remember handheld camera as a certain cliché of Great Recession movies but it's done well here, never distracting and calling attention to itself, only intensifying if anything the things it is witnessing.

That said, some of Blue Valentine does feel a bit unbaked or overbaked. This oven is not perfect. Gosling and Williams have little chemistry although that also works for the picture. A long section in the middle involves an attempt at a romantic getaway, that hallmark of the failing relationship which tends to bring out the worst in faltering couples. I suspect we've all been here so it's a good idea for the picture. But the motel is distractingly absurd, a sleazy theme place and they are in something called the "Future Room," all done up in chrome and purple lights with a rotating circular bed and no windows. It's like something from a play by Jean-Paul Sartre about hell.

We might spend a little too much time in that motel but the narrative structure also roams at will into the past, explaining the pieces of Cindy and Dean and how they fell together. It's not really an auspicious union even if a rainbow appears at the moment they meet on their magical special day. It might be the only one they ever have. Among other things Blue Valentine is a movie about self-deception too, about wanting a relationship so badly, for whatever reason, that a person who does not know himself can talk himself into anything. Dean has an "our song"—and a great one, "You and Me" by Penny & the Quarters—but he's obviously been toting it around for the next time he gets into a relationship.

In most sad love stories there's often an impulse to sort of step back and say things like there are no bad guys here. But I think there may well be a bad guy here and his name is Dean. He comes by it honestly, more or less, he's just a lost soul trying to find his way home, a stranger on the bus. But his wife-beater undershirt and his wife-beater facial hair go against the grain of his little boy lost vibe in sinister ways. Cindy, indeed, is much more familiar as the woman trying to escape a dangerous relationship, whose friends and coworkers know her story and rally behind her.

The most famous scene in Blue Valentine is highlighted in the trailer and worth revisiting in full. It takes place on the evening of their magical special day, when Dean pulls out a ukulele for a strange rendition of "You Always Hurt the One You Love" and Cindy jumps around dancing to it in front of a closed storefront. Clonk. Obviously it couldn't be more obvious—the choice of song, the bizarre way Gosling performs it, which is still effective (as Cindy notes), everything about it. It's furiously awkward and poignant and overdone and devastating all at once, just like this movie. At the end, it's Independence Day—but the fireworks make it looks like a war zone. Perfect.