Blue Valentine

R, strong sexual content, language, beating, 112 mins

Fri		5:00	7:30
Sat & Sun	2:00	5:00	7:30
Mon-Thurs		5:30

 

 

It’s too bad that so much attention for director Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine focuses on its “graphic” sexual content and the fact that it barely escaped the kiss-of-death NC-17 rating.  The controversy has allowed many critics to observe (again) how squeamish Americans are about frank and non-exploitative depictions of sex in the cinema while showing no concern for the violent, blood-drenched excesses of torture porn.  Which is fine, but also bypasses the strengths of Cianfrance’s film (co-written with Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne) while concentrating on what it’s not (pornography).  So let’s focus on the film instead, making note of its artistry and often painfully insightful look at the deterioration of a marriage (the title is ironic, yes, but ambiguous as well).  Cindy (a searing performance by Oscar-nominated Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling, who should have been nominated as well) are a young, attractive couple who have been married for six years and have a daughter.  In terms of career goals, neither has ever shown too much ambition, but early in their courtship they showed great attention to each other.  Dean, in particular, was open-hearted and imaginative in his expressions of romantic devotion; the strength of that passion drew Cindy to him, and for a while it was fun just being in love.  Then, gradually, it wasn’t as fun.  It became work.  It seemed to take more time, more energy, more concentration, to rekindle that earlier adrenalin-like rush of sheer joy that Cindy and Dean once had simply being together.  Although their characters only age six years within the film, Williams and Gosling have a genuine acting challenge: they must portray their characters at two distinct stages in their lives-as wide-eyed, optimistic, love struck youths and as more experienced adults who have been hardened by disappointment.  Williams and Gosling have to depict just the right degree of emotional transformation that’s believable within a relatively short span of six years.  Watching gorgeous twenty-something actors play cynical, embittered “survivors” of romantic disillusionment has the potential to be very irritating (and unintentionally funny) unless played and written with absolute precision and skill.  Mature audiences (those who would go see a film that nearly received an NC-17 rating not because of the sex scenes) are a tough crowd for those trying to make a serious film about marital strife between a husband and wife who are barely 30 years old.  If it failed, the film would be mocked as “Scenes from a Marriage” for the YouTube generation.  Such derision would make more tentative filmmakers shy away completely or attempt to rewrite the material for much older actors (even if they couldn’t grasp the different perspective of an older generation). Fortunately for moviegoers hungry for complex, adult drama, Cianfrance, Williams, and Gosling were not intimidated by the emotional weight of their subject, nor did they foolishly try to play “older.”  Blue Valentine is the rare film that centers upon characters in their late twenties who act precisely their age: not like world-weary forty-year-olds, or hormonally imbalanced teenagers, but like what people in their twenties are actually like, what moviegoers are (or remember being) at that age.  To watch a psychologically astute drama about a married couple who happen to be in their late twenties is remarkably powerful.  The generation born in the 1980’s isn’t usually depicted this authentically in films.  Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Blue Valentine is the refusal to produce obvious, cut-and-dried reasons for Cindy’s and Dean’s marriage falling apart.  Other films create reasons: the husband is an alcoholic; the wife is having an affair; the stress of parenting has driven them both to the breaking point; and so on.  Cianfrance and his actors know that these “reasons” are phony; they might be symptoms of real problems, but relationships really break up for many reasons, most of them complex and difficult to explain.  Realistically-portrayed marital discord is hard to “translate” to film: the reasons that couples break up are often intertwined with the reasons they stay together.  Blue Valentine gets to the core of that dichotomy and renders it in memorable, wise, and compelling fashion.