Among the most anticipated titles of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival -- as well as one of its most haunted, troubled productions -- the Ryan Gosling/Michelle Williams relationship saga Blue Valentine finally reached the screen at Sunday afternoon's world premiere. Twelve years in the making, director Derek Cianfrance's film endured more stops, starts and development hiccups than perhaps any other in the festival competition. I desperately wanted to like it. Alas, there could be no more screeching halt than the plotless, indulgent, grueling, indier-than-thou melodrama that ensued after the lights went down.
[Spoilers follow]
Cianfrance first came to Sundance in 1998 with his feature debut Brothers Tied, a striking, modulated drama that would be the director's last until arriving this year with Valentine. Part of the hold-up was its conceptual ambition; a deeply personal story based in part on his own experience with divorced parents, the tale of Dean (Gosling) and Cindy (Williams) contrasts the present-day pit of their marriage with flashbacks depicting the couple's early romance and the seeds that precipitated its downfall. The approach presents one of the Sundanciest of clichés (last year alone featured such disjointed love stories as Peter and Vandy and (500) Days of Summer), but nothing so insurmountable that it must alienate the viewer by default. And in fact, with actors as gifted, smart and fearless as Gosling and Williams on the scene, Blue Valentine seemed a can't-lose proposition once it finally got rolling.
Except Valentine never does get rolling. To the contrary, it squeals and belches and stalls time and again, scene after scene, held hostage by Cianfrance's lack of discipline and Gosling's surfeit of self-satisfaction. Poor Williams occupies the base of this top-heavy creative triangle, once again playing the topless victim and struggling to anchor the boys' brooding as it stagnates and rots into the present day. Indeed, her Cindy represents the lone ambition in the story itself. When we meet her in rural Pennsylvania, she's a flustered mother and wife; her husband Dean is no more mature than their 5-year-old daughter. Cindy's distance from him is evident in her virtual allergy to eye contact and her haste to flee to work, where she's a nurse for a slimy doctor urging her to take a newer, better job out of town. The suggestions glance off Williams's shellshocked face -- one reflecting the acceptance if not quite the understanding of how she ever got to this point.
After all, in better days she was a good-hearted college student with a lousy boyfriend and strict parents who finds romantic rescue in the arms of the very same Dean, a high-school dropout who lavishes her with marble-mouthed entreaties and other sloppy charms. It takes another impossibly chance meet-cute on a city bus before she succumbs to him, however -- or rather him and his ukelele, which Dean strums as Cindy dances in an impromptu musical number that helps Cianfrance mark "twee" off his Sundance qualifications checklist.
That said, this era is by far the most believable of their relationship. The rest comprises a juxtaposition of unplanned pregnancies, suicide threats off the Manhattan Bridge, violent beatings, run-over dogs, numerous screaming matches, gratuitous shower erotica (or attempted erotica, anyway), and other narrative implausibilities fueling Cianfrance's appetite for destruction. It's not enough that Cindy and Dean should simply drive off to a sleazy sex motel in his attempt to rekindle and/or save their marriage; she must bump into her ex on the way to the sex motel, then disclose this encounter to Dean as if he wouldn't bristle at the mention of the guy who once beat him to within an inch of his life.
Like all of Blue Valentine's emo-fascist twaddle, Cianfrance counts on this working dramatically because of the non-linear plot. Dean's suspicion is supposed to add a flourish of mystery and darkness to the proceedings, but for a change (and a wholly remarkable one) Gosling isn't dynamic enough to drive the least bit of emotion from his co-star or his viewer. Instead, we get fast, flabby bursts of alpha-male posturing, mostly improvised in a kind of freestyle blend of repeated rhetorical questions ("What are you gonna do?" "You want it like this?") and lost-child whinging ("I don't know what to do! Tell me what to do! I'll do it! I'll do it!"). Gosling's tics are hilariously disingenuous, with every hand through his receding hairline (yet another clumsy symbol of passing time) almost always giving way to a slumping head and some groan that might be dialogue. The results are not only insulting to Williams, who dangles quite credibly at wits end despite having no grip to work with, but also emblematic of the smug, self-conscious place where Sundance films go to die. It all plays out like a nightmare Ingmar Bergman might have had were he drugged and date-raped on the set of Scenes From a Marriage.
It simply didn't have to be this way. Even cinematographer Andrij Parekh, whose exquisite, shallow depths of field gave Gosling so much of his Oscar-nominated presence in Half Nelson, is limited here to flat, inert renditions of both actors. Cianfrance defaults to blurry close-ups during the film's rather graphic sex scenes, kind of the aesthete's budget alternative to soft-core cheesecloth. In the end, the director underscores his utter lack of control over virtually everything onscreen with a final shot that actually does work. God forbid I should spoil that minor success here, but I don't mind giving away the promise that you'll ask yourself after watching Blue Valentine: "Why was I never more moved than when it was finally, finally over?"