BLUE VALENTINE

“BLUE VALENTINE” (Ryan Gosling & Michelle Williams)

This is the type of project you wonder why anyone would green light.
It is sad, depressing, poorly told & relatively boring.
Once some dreary executive gave it the thumbs up, they bring in a director who decides practically every scene should be shot in EXTREME close ups & I do mean extreme; most conversations are filled with the face of the speaker from the eyebrows to lower lip portions of their faces. It gave this very realistic film an unrealistic feel because people don’t have conversations fractions of inches away from their companions’ faces.
Then they bring in another annoying habit – let’s bounce around in time so no one knows when each scene is actually taking place in chronological time. This is a very simple story of a couple from courtship to break up & yet for the first half-hour or so, I had no idea what was going on. My wife, who rarely utters a word during a film, turned to me & said, “I’m confused.” And all I could do was shrug my shoulders in agreement, even though I had caught on to the pre-marriage/post-marriage flip flopping by looking at Ryan Gosling’s hairline – Receding, they are a married couple – Full head of hair, they’re back in time to when they were dating. So the story gets jumbled as well - you see one scene where they appear to care for one another a great deal and Ryan’s character, Dean, is a sweet guy who’d do anything for Michelle Williams’ Cindy – to a balding, bitter, chain smoking resentful Dean that has a quick temper and blames Cindy for everything that goes wrong in their lives. Cindy, on the other hand never really commits to Dean so she goes from ‘needing’ him but not sure if she wants him to being unsure as to whether or not she needs him, but very sure of the fact that she doesn’t ‘want’ him anymore. So they cohabitate basically for the sake of a child that Dean knows isn’t biologically his. The little girl doesn’t know this, of course, since her mother married Dean while pregnant with her.
Then let’s bring in my old friend Mr. Boredom. In the first half hour of ‘Blue Valentine’ the family dog is missing, Dean gets a job, then the dog is found... that’s about all that happens – In the FIRST HALF HOUR. I began thinking of better titles and came up with ‘You Are Wearily Numb’ – or ‘YAWN’ for short.
The movie basically consists of one boring bland conversation/argument after another. The lone highlight is a funny, but sick little joke that Cindy tells Dean to prove she has a sense of humor (During one of their dating-era scenes)
To describe this film scene by scene it would go – Here’s a dysfunctional couple / Now they’re in love / Now they’re dysfunctional / Now they like each other, sort of... Repeat a dozen times – The End.
The acting isn’t bad – Gosling rises above the material, but despite a valiant effort, I don’t think he should be considered for a Best Actor nod because the film is such a let down. Other than the joke she tells, Cindy doesn’t emote much; I truly thought she was going to wind up committing suicide because she seemed to get no enjoyment from life. By the film’s end I felt that bad things kept happening to Cindy because Cindy doesn’t attempt to get any fun out of life. This is the kind of person most of us would rather not have to socialize with – so why make a movie about such a person? Watching her purposely suck all the joy out of life made me so depressed, I almost forgave Dean for becoming the jerk that resorts to violence at the film’s climax.
“Blue Valentine” is bland, boring and extremely depressing to watch – What’s not to love? I wondered if they shot it realistically (no extreme close-ups) & told it as it happened; cute couple fall in love without really having anything in common and then the nice guy who weds the pregnant girl slowly watches his marriage disintegrate – If THAT would have made it more interesting and less depressing?
But since it is mostly uninteresting and depressing, I don’t think so...
The pedophile joke was funny though.