Ryan McNeil
When we’re young it can feel like love can conquer all. As the years go on we become jaded into believing that less and less. What’s interesting is that when we’re older, love can conquer even more as the love we feel becomes based more on true devotion, and less on lustful attraction. At that point, it’s less a question of whether or not love can conquer all, but instead whether or not you want to give it the chance to conquer.
BLUE VALENTINE is the story of Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams). When we meet them at the beginning of the film, they have clearly been married for a few years. They live an unglamorous life where Dean is a house painter and Cindy is a nurse. There is a frost that has permeated their relationship with one-another, but hasn’t trickled over on to their relationship with their six-year-old daughter Frankie.
While we aren’t entirely certain how they got here (“here” being an existence where they disagree on how to prepare breakfast and escape to corny motels for an attempt at physical intimacy), we are certain of their beginnings. Through flashbacks we see the innocent way in which they met while Cindy was a college student and Dean was a grunt at a moving company. Back then they shared a charming kinship. What happened to that kinship? Well…what often happens to that kinship?
BLUE VALENTINE feels like a very honest film. It’s not out to make us feel goopy-in-love, and it’s not out to make us feel maudlin with pity. It’s only out to make us feel. By not spelling out who Cindy and Dean are, nor how they’ve arrived at this point in their marriage, it trusts us to pick up on what we most need to know: this relationship is broken. What’s most interesting is that before any voices are raised or arguments sparked, it trusts us to notice subtleties…like a lack of warmth, an absence of intimacy, and not so much as a nod goodbye as one of the two pulls away for their drive to work.
Making this jagged little pill that much harder to swallow is the look back to Dean and Cindy’s beginnings. At just the right moments, the film takes us from a divisive incident in their present, to a contrasting moment of connection in their past. Their attraction is one centred on a goofy charm, and “what the hell” outlook on life. They begin, as many of us do, believing that nothing was impossible so long as they had each other…and indeed it gets put to the test early. Is it depressing to see such loving determination worn down to a nub? You bet.
The film never actually shows us the tipping point, but it’s clear to see that somewhere along the way, these two people fell out of sync, and either they didn’t realize it, or didn’t happen to tell one-another. Watching what’s become of them is what gives BLUE VALENTINE it’s authenticity.
Fights between adults like Cindy and Dean aren’t always screaming matches. Often, they’re terse conversations in a car about a detail one person thinks is important and the other doesn’t. It’s these moments that dot real-life stressed relationships. Before the broken plates, before the streams of tears, before the vicious yelling…it all starts with terse conversations. The heartbreaker is by the time we see this particular moment, things are clearly much too fractured to reset.
BLUE VALENTINE isn’t the sort of film I’ll watch repeatedly, or even seek to own, but it is one that I won’t soon forget. It filled me with with pathos and waved a big red warning flag of what not to do in my own marriage. What I won’t soon forget though, is an innocent question about her parents Cindy poses to her grandmother:
How do you trust your feelings when they can just disappear like that?
It’s a valid one, and a question that’s at the heart of the whole story. The answer is that you can’t: that’s why they’re emotions and not truth. What Cindy doesn’t understand is that as time goes by it falls on our shoulders to see past our feelings, as positive or negative as they may be, and seek out the truth that will tell us who our partners are…why we loved them once…and why we still do.