Blue Valentine: Heartbreak hotel

Blue Valentine , an emotionally lacerating portrayal of a fraying marriage, is a far cry from romantic fantasies.

“Do you want the Cupid’s Cove or the Future Room?” Dean (Ryan Gosling) asks his wife Cindy (Michelle Williams), as the two book reservations at a cheap hotel for a romantic getaway.

He may as well be asking her about the path of their relationship, which is fast hurtling towards an end. Ironically, they choose the Future Room with its tacky revolving bed and space age themed wall paper, where an attempt at rekindling their flame leads to disaster.

Director Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine , an emotionally lacerating portrayal of a fraying marriage, is a far cry from Hollywood romantic fantasies. Potent in the knowledge that love, even real, chemical love such as Dean and Cindy’s, can turn sour, Blue Valentine starts six years into their marriage. Cindy is a harried nurse, Dean a house-painter, raising a young child. When the family dog dies, grief, instead of drawing them closer, reveals the irrevocable wedge between them. As Cindy sobs uncontrollably, Dean berates her through clenched teeth “How many times did I tell you to lock the gate!” What, we wonder, are two people so obviously at odds doing with each other?

Cianfrance gives us the answer in smooth flashbacks and leisurely long takes, going back to the couple’s early courting, when Cindy was a medical student and Dean worked for a moving company. The present transitions to the past smoothly. No subtitles are needed here — the actors’ expressions signal the shift in time more convincingly than any captions. Cindy’s brightness and intelligence in the past sequences segue into bitterness, anger and seething resentment. Dean goes from being an unambitious good guy to a frustrated layabout, with a receding hairline and a cigarette perpetually dangling from his lips. Williams and Gosling have a searing on-screen chemistry, and the exuberance of their relationship is brilliantly captured in an improvised scene depicting the couple’s first date. He plays the ukulele; she dances a goofy jig, without a trace of artifice.

But we view the joy and freshness of even that early love through the lens of sorrow and hindsight. Deft yet natural flashbacks show us the trajectory of their love, honing into the seeds of their ruin, barely perceptible at the time. Scenes from the past in which Cindy clutches onto Dean for support are juxtaposed with those from the present in which she barks “I need some space!” as he tries to come near her. Their present day defensiveness makes a painful contrast to that first reaching out, and the movie is rich in details of a relationship in decay. These characters change by becoming more and more the same, refusing, even unable, to change their behaviours and grow together.

In all of this, Cianfrance manages to insert with uncanny naturalness, a comment on abortion so harrowing, you’ll be at the edge of your seat.

Cindy and Dean’s battles resonate deeply and the pain we experience as viewers is visceral. The movie feels like Cianfrance had to wrench his guts out to make it. The director had originally planned to film the past scenes several years in advance of the present ones, but couldn’t because of budgetary restrictions. But both Gosling and Williams give powerful performances. I haven’t yet seen Portman in Black Swan, but I’m hard-pressed to imagine what could possibly trump Williams’ portrayal of the stressed out Cindy constantly trying to hide her feelings and quash her resentment. Long after you’re done watching it, Blue Valentine will have you mulling over the quirks of relationships, and the destruction wreaked by love.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 27^th, 2011.