It must be sad movie week for me. First, Melancholia and now Derek Cianfrance's beautiful and gut-wrenching Blue Valentine.
The central conflict in Blue Valentine is devastating in its simplicity and commonness. Two young people who don't have much in common other than their initial physical attraction get married for the wrong reasons and end up miserable years later. It's a story as old as time and nearly everyone can relate to it: to love is to experience pain. I don't mean to sound like a melodramatic teenager (despite my use of Smiths lyrics as the title of this post), but when we love someone and take that leap into a relationship, we are accepting vulnerability and helplessness. It's a given--it's part of the deal. Vulnerability is what makes love...well, love.
But I digress. Michelle Williams plays Cindy and Ryan Gosling plays Dean. The couple have been married for about 6 years and have a daughter, Frankie. The movie opens at the beginning of the end of their marriage and then cuts back and forth between how they met and fell in love and how it all unravels in the end. In the beginning, the major differences between Cindy and Dean don't matter so much. Cindy is intelligent and ambitious. She is studying medicine. She comes from what appears to be an abusive home and is in a relationship with an abusive jerk. When she meets Dean, he becomes an escape route for her--an attractive, fun guy who clearly worships her. Dean lacks ambition. He never finished high school. His ideal job is one that allows him to drink beer at work and make enough money to put some food on the table. But Dean loves Cindy the way a puppy loves its master: unconditionally and in a way that puts the two of them on radically different footing. Cindy starts out as a lost girl who is intrigued by Dean's boyish qualities, but she grows into a woman who needs to be with a man. Dean stays a boy and doesn't want anything to change. He just wants to love Cindy and Frankie and do nothing else with his life.
It's this dynamic that makes Blue Valentine so real and so, so sad: neither Dean nor Cindy is the villain here. They both have their flaws--Cindy is unable to communicate effectively; Dean drinks too much, etc. But no one is really the bad guy. The two are just fundamentally different people. So many relationships end not because one person is abusive or adulterous, but because two people just change and grow apart over time.
In an attempt to salvage their flailing marriage, Dean convinces Cindy to spend the night with him what has to be the saddest sex motel ever. They choose the "Future" room, which Dean aptly remarks looks like "a robot's vagina". Dean's plan is for the two of them to "get drunk and make love". Well, the succeed on the "drunk" part. In fact, it's probably the alcohol that ruins the evening. The two get massively blitzed and try to...er..."make love" is definitely not the right phrase. "Screw" is more appropriate. Dean's attempts to pleasure Cindy are met with resistance and disgust. The look of pain and repulsion on Cindy's face while Dean kisses his way down her body says it all. She has no love, lust, like, or respect for this man any more, as much as he keeps trying and trying.
The next day, Cindy leaves for work and doesn't bother to wake Dean up. Dean goes to the doctor's office where Cindy works as a nurse and confronts her. The scene transitions from awkward and cringe-inducing to violent. It culminates with Cindy telling Dean "I am so out of love with you! I have nothing left for you!" Ouch. It's not that Cindy hates Dean--that would indicate passion of some sort. She's just apathetic and exhausted. The marriage isn't dying, it's dead.
Despite the pain of Blue Valentine, I was enthralled by the film. It's a fascinating character study and although it's difficult to watch at times, it's never boring. For a movie with such a simple plot, Blue Valentine feels full and complete. Williams and Gosling are so talented--they fully inhabit their characters, and the viewer is able to forget their outer beauty when they let their characters' inner ugliness shine through.
A quick side note/rant: Blue Valentine was originally given an NC-17 rating before the director appealed to the MPAA and got the rating downgraded to an R. Apparently, the film was given its original rating for an "emotionally charged scene of sexuality". I've seen this movie and there is no way any of the sex scenes warrant an NC-17. You barely see the actors' bodies, since the camera focuses mainly on their faces in extreme close-up. In addition to the sex motel scene, there's a slightly more graphic scene of Dean performing oral sex on Cindy when they first start going out. The characters are fully clothed and the scene lasts about 20 seconds, but I can just see the MPAA counting the head bobs, or moans, or whatever it is on their checklist of "consensual adult pleasure" that offends them so much and slapping the film with an NC-17. I know it's been said before, but when movies like Hostel and The Human Centipede get R ratings and Blue Valentine gets an NC-17 for an "emotional" sex scene and half a minute of fully-clothed oral sex, there's something wrong with our culture and societal values. Or, you know, the values of the MPAA, which are extremely out of touch with reality.
I said that Melancholia was "painful and somewhat worth it". Blue Valentine is painful and completely worth it. It's a small-scale masterpiece. I know that Cindy and Dean aren't real, but at the end of the movie I found myself hoping that they would be able to move on with their lives and find new partners better suited for them. It's the mark of a great movie when the characters feel so real that you continue to think about them and worry for them long after the movie is over.
4.5 out of 5 stars
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