Blue Valentine Review

WARNING: SPOILERS

Definitely a movie that went under most cinemagoers’ radar during the awards season of 2010, Blue Valentine was a surprisingly painful and gut-wrenching movie to watch. Only available in limited release in Canada, it was difficult to find a theater near where I live that played the movie but the journey was definitely worth it and I finally got around to seeing it in late January. All in all, Blue Valentine is a movie I found to be one of the more rewarding movie experiences in the past year, and one that challenged the conventions of its genre.

The movie, directed by a relative unknown (Derek Cianfrance), has a poignant resonance that elevates it above the rest of the schlocky romantic dramas that come out every year and the main reason behind that is the riveting performance of its two leads (Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling). What drew me and interested me in watching this film in the first place was the presence of Ryan Gosling as the male lead. Ryan Gosling, an actor who I used to revile and solely associate with “Young Hercules”, a terrible TV show I used to watch as a kid, has completely changed my perception of him in recent years. He impressed me with his performance in the largely ignored “Half Nelson”, a movie that actually got him an Oscar nomination in 2006, and he also had similarly great performances in the otherwise unremarkable “Fracture” and “Lars and the Real Girl”. Playing the role of Dean, this is by far his best and most mature role and he has become one of my favourite young actors working in Hollywood today. Gosling exudes a certain magnetic charm and charisma that makes his character’s decline into a balding, out of shape, and at times violent alcoholic even more difficult to witness. Williams’ performance as Cindy is equally as good as Gosling’s, and she is very convincing as a depressed and sad woman who has fallen out of love and wants more out of life.

The movie, at its core, is beautiful in its simplicity. It tells the sometimes touching, sometimes painful to watch love story between two people who ended up together in less than ideal circumstances and who are ultimately looking for different things in life. The movie adeptly moves back and forth through time from the past to the present as the story of their relationship slowly unfolds and you begin to understand the characters more and more. Parts of the plot do seem to fall into the general clichés of the genre but they are handled with a maturity and at other times with a tragic realism that you would not find in the typical Julia Roberts flick. The movie’s cinematography has a very unique and immersive feel that utilizes extreme close-ups of the leads in certain scenes that some may find awkward and unwieldy at times but it serves the movie’s intense tone well. There are graphic sex scenes in the movie that aren’t easy to watch, and it is during those scenes, at the pinnacle of the problems of the relationship, that you see the worst in both characters during a drunken and regrettable night spent at a seedy motel.

The greatest success of this movie is that it has three dimensional characters that are unique in their depth and true to themselves. Both characters are just looking for happiness in life and strive to achieve it, and both make their mistakes, and in a rare success in a film of this genre, you understand why they make those mistakes. You may not like where the movie takes you or what ultimately ends up happening, but you understand the characters’ motivations behind their decisions and choices.  The movie never gives you one big reason why things go wrong but just shows how things slowly unravel over time. There isn’t some big reveal or some major infidelity that ultimately ends the relationship, but rather, it is the slow and steady realization that the person you are with is not who you are meant to be with; the steady realization that you can’t be happy and there is no way to work things out. You see the good and the bad in both characters, and while there was a time when they were happy, it becomes apparent how nothing in life is clear cut and simple, and how redemption and happy endings aren’t always what lie in store for every relationship.

B+

Trailer:   
    

Movie Info: 

Runtime: 112 min  

MPAA rating: R 

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

Director: Derek Cianfrance

Screenplay: Derek Cianfrance, Cami Delavigne, Joey Curtis

Cinematography: Andrij Parekh 

Distributed by: The Weinstein Company