Blue Valentine (***)

Commenting on contemporary fiction in The Atlantic, literary conservative B. R. Myers laments that “[c]haracters are now conceived as if the whole point of literature were to create plausible likenesses of the folks next door.” Mainstream cinema veers between fantasy characters and ordinary characters in fantastic situations, but only independent usually looks at regular people in regular situations. Here, Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling play Dean and Cindy, a couple living in northern Pennsylvania with a preschool-age daughter whose relationship may be starting to deteriorate.

The movie is not as depressing as it might be because about half of it is flashbacks relating the tender courtship—the charming high school dropout wooing the young medical student. Gosling reminded me of his breakthrough role in The Notebook in a scene in which Dean threatens to jump off a bridge if Cindy won’t tell him what’s on her mind. (In The Notebook, Gosling’s character vows to jump off a Ferris wheel if Rachel McAdams’s character won’t agree to a date.) The Notebook is the fantasy version of a romance, and it’s notable in skipping from marriage right to death. I wonder what either of its character would have said if a granddaughter had asked, as Cindy asks her grandmother, “How do you trust your feelings when it can just disappear like that?” Of course, charming courtship scenes look at little different when that thought hangs over the drama.

In flitting back and forth a few years, I’m not sure director Derek Cianfrance really shows the path from blind love to malaise, but he excels at evoking it. In an early scene, Dean lightly scolds Cindy for giving tasteless oatmeal to their daughter, and she gets upset at his encouraging her to eat off the table. Dean’s attempt at arranging a romantic weekend getaway constitutes much of the drama, and eventually brings things to a head, but the ending is typically low-key. Cianfrance doesn’t use handheld cameras, but the music is minimal and the voices are often miked far away, so the movie comes off a little lo-fi. It’s film of small details, like another Michelle Williams film, Wendy and Lucy. I’m not sure Myers would approve of this kind of film, but even he allows that “a good storyteller can interest us in just about anybody.”

There was some controversy about this movie because the producers successfully challenged the initial NC-17 rating. There are a few intimate scenes; Williams is shown topless, and Dean is shown orally pleasuring her, but you can’t directly see that. All in all, the notion that such a film would be considered for the harshest rating and mainstream films with torture scenes would not is, to my mind, an indictment of the ratings system and/or American values.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 3/10/11