Go See Blue Valentine, but not on Valentine's Day

BLUE VALENTINE (2010)

Directed by Derek Cianfrance

112 mins. R (though it could easily be NC-17)

* * * *

Go see Blue Valentine. Just don’t see it on Valentine’s Day if you’re with someone you care about. This one is billed as a romantic drama, but romantic tragedy would be more apt.

Blue Valentine is a character study built around a fairly slight and straightforward story. It traces the doomed romance of Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) and it’s one of those stories that--in Phoenix’s words--makes it perfectly clear why they got together in the first place and why they can’t stay together. Cindy is a small-town Pennsylvania girl who everyone says has “potential” and should become a doctor. She goes off to college in New York, which, alas, is also where Bobby, her jerk of a high school boyfriend is going to school. Cindy will soon dump him, but not before he gets her pregnant. New York is also where she connects with Dean, who is everything Bobby isn’t: funny, quirky, talkative, and the sort who’d do anything for Cindy, including marrying her with a biscuit in the oven.

This is another in a recent spate of non-linear movie and it works very well. It rockets back and forth between the New York courtship days and four years into the future, when Dean is a chain-smoking, paint-splattered handyman with a paunch, a balding pate, and a bad set of glasses. He’s also a helluva dad, who dotes on Frankie (Faith Wladyka) with a love that goes beyond whose genes are coursing through her veins. The family is back in Cindy’s Pennsylvania hometown, where they live in a shoddy house that’s a half step removed from a house trailer. Cindy’s a nurse, not a doctor and she’s become one of those silently quaking people who is filled with regret and rage. Part of her rage comes from something she failed to see in Dean before they married: he never aspired to be anything other than what he is. Theirs is a descent into white trash despair.

It’s one heck of a ride. As a product of small-town Pennsylvania myself, I squirmed uncomfortably as a parade of familiar characters passed by--various forms of Cindy living lives of might-have-beens, pretending that’s just fine, but knowing it damned well isn’t. Every now and then they grab at a straw. There’s a scene in one of those schlocky Poconos resorts to which Dean and Cindy retreat that’s as surrealistic as anything Fellini ever imagined. Gosling is quickly establishing himself as a master in the role of the damaged male. He hits all the right notes as a guy who’d probably do the right thing, if only he was smart enough to figure out what it was. Alas, he’s not. Even though Cindy’s living a déclassé life, she’s still way out of Dean’s league. Michelle Williams is stunning as Cindy, and fearless. You’ll see quite a lot of her naked body in Blue Valentine, but the scenes are mostly anti-erotic ones in which Williams exudes equal parts vulnerability, desperation, and ennui. It’s a testament to her ability as an actress that one as gorgeous as she can use nudity to make the viewer feel sordid.

By now you’ve no doubt gotten the point that this is not a feel-good movie. Don’t be put off by this. It’s a downer, but Blue Valentine is also powerful, emotional, superbly acted, and feeds its audience something other than the saccharine-sweetened pap we’ve grown accustomed to seeing at the multiplex. Yep--it’s that rarest of things: a movie for grown-ups.