Blue Valentine is such a mannered, affected piece of filmmaking that in its early minutes, I wasn't sure I'd be able to survive it. A prematurely aged Ryan Gosling, wearing an aggressively receding hairline -- the character he's playing appears to be 27 going on 62 -- is roused from an armchair snooze by his young daughter, who informs him, with the kind of solemn urgency that kindergarteners pull off so well, that the family dog has gone missing. Gosling's Daddy Dean, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips, scoops the girl into his arms (her name is Frankie, and she's played by a grave charmer named Faith Wladyka) and the two head out into the family's scrubby yard on a search mission.
As openings go, this one reeks of deadbeat realism: We've seen that the family lives in a somewhat beaten-up, beaten-down house; we know something bad has happened to the dog; we can sense from the blend of exhaustion and concern on Dean's face that he'll do anything for his daughter and yet he isn't getting enough sleep, enough love, enough something. And a little later, when we see the face of his wife, and Frankie's mom, Cindy (Michelle Williams), it becomes clear that very little in this household is right. Cindy's pretty, elfin features may as well be obscured by a grayish storm cloud. She looks careworn and disheartened, spent from the inside out.
The early moments of Blue Valentine show us a young couple getting through daily life, just barely, and they also clue us in to the fondness the director, Derek Cianfrance, harbors for too-tight close-ups and lingering shots of oblique, nondescript surroundings. But in the battle between claustrophobic, showily indie filmmaking and the raw openness of the lead actors, the latter wins by a long shot. The faces of these performers -- particularly Williams' -- are the key to Blue Valentine.
Cianfrance -- who cowrote the script with Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne -- has structured the movie as a kind of back-and-forth dialogue between a relationship's beginning and its end; he essentially treats this relationship as if it were an interview subject. We first see Cindy and Dean trapped in their tiring, unsatisfactory lives. Then we see them as younger, freer versions of themselves, people who are open to possibilities, not beaten down by realities. Cindy is a college student (she hopes to study medicine) living somewhere in a less-than-urban but not-quite-rural part of Pennsylvania. Dean, who lives in Brooklyn, works as a mover. He meets Cindy one day as he's getting a customer settled into a nursing home. She's there visiting her grandmother, and for him (though not for her), it's love at first sight.
The present-day versions of Cindy and Dean are bruised and battered. When they find that the family dog has been fatally hit by a car, they dispatch Frankie to Cindy's parents' house and decide -- with much coaxing on Dean's part -- to treat themselves to an overnight at a cheesy Poconos getaway spot. (Dean books them into "The Future Room," which boasts a revolving bed and '70s-leftover lunar wall murals.) There, in a painful, protracted sequence, Dean practically begs for sex; Cindy rebuffs him with almost violent indifference -- she slaps away at his pectorals noncommitally and ineffectually, but if she doesn't exactly know what she wants from him, what she doesn't want is brutally clear. She radiates a complex aura of self-loathing and repulsion at his very being.
Dean's needs and wants are simpler and in some ways more painful: He wants to be able to drink beer at 8 in the morning, every morning, even before work (he paints houses for a living). He wants Cindy to love him, physically and otherwise. He wants to spend time with his daughter. He's just a big kid when he's around Frankie, and she's understandably nuts about him. When Cindy -- in a rush to get to her job as a nurse -- serves Frankie a rushed, inedible breakfast, Dean saves the day by scooping the raisins out of the kid's sodden oatmeal and placing them on the table, suggesting that the two of them "eat like leopards" -- which means without using silverware, or their hands.
It's easy to see why that exasperates Cindy: She grumbles about how it's hard enough to look after one kid, let alone two. And though she appears to be the harder-to-please half of this pair, her diffuse frustration and her barely suppressed anger make her more sympathetic rather than less. To his credit, Cianfrance is canny about the ways he maps this disintegrating relationship. He takes great care with the telling details, the clues that suggest everything these two people can be at their best: When the younger Dean moves that elderly gentleman into the nursing home, he can't bring himself to simply dump the man's belongings, even though his boss is urging him to hurry. He insists on unpacking the boxes carefully and attempting to bring some cheer to the willfully cheerless surroundings, even setting up a string of Christmas lights around the window. Gosling's Dean is a working-class dreamer, a guy with big insecurities but an even bigger heart.
Cindy is far more practical, sometimes to the point of seeming cold. But there's undeniable warmth in the way she draws Dean close to her early in their courtship, after holding him somewhat warily at arm's length. On the couple's first date -- if you could call it that -- she performs a loosey-goosey tap dance as Dean warbles a version of "You Always Hurt the One You Love" on ukelele. (The moment is almost too cute, but that, I think is the point. In those courtship scenes, Dean and Cindy are creating their own temporary bubble world, as young lovers so often do.) And in a later scene, when Cindy makes a last-minute decision that will change the course of her life, the force of her self-determination hits hard. This is a woman who can do anything she wants to do -- and yet who too often, it seems, finds it hard to say no.
At times, Cianfrance's filmmaking approach is too coy for the emotional nakedness of his lead performers -- the camera dances around them a little too cleverly, when stark simplicity is what's needed. (This is Cianfrance's second feature. His first was the 1998 Brother Tied.) But he gets certain crucial things right: While it's true that the family dog has met a sad end, the event is handled in a way that's wholly sensitive toward the grief adults feel at the loss of a pet, not as a shockeroo dramatic device. And thankfully, Cianfrance won his battle with the MPAA ratings board over the movie's oral-sex scene. The sequence is shot with just the right mix of discretion and boldness by cinematographer Andrij Parekh. It's the sort of thing the movies need more of, not less.
And Cianfrance clearly values his actors. At times, Gosling appears to be working too hard at working-class angst; he could stand to dial down the regular-guy routine just a bit. But there's no denying his character's pain. Gosling keeps all the elements of Dean's character -- his helplessness, his constantly wounded pride, his stubborn refusal to face certain ugly realities -- in perfect balance. Dean isn't easy to like; it's easier to love him, in all his aggravating, aggravated glory.
But this really is Williams' movie. In some ways, she has little to do -- Cindy is the reflective foil to Dean's roaring flame. But it's the rage simmering not-so-invisibly beneath her reserve that gets you. Williams plays Cindy as a woman who's been burning the candle at both ends for too long -- there's nothing left but a lump of charred bitterness in the middle. And yet she can't succumb to hopelessness: Williams gives us a clear, piercing view of Cindy's dashed expectations, but even in the character's darkest moments, you keep wondering if Williams' sly, dancing smile might suddenly break through. Blue Valentine is the story of a relationship that might have gone either way: Some romances start out blessedly, blissfully perfect and fall to ashes within months. Others lurch along at the beginning only to deepen with each passing decade. When you start a new love story, you can never know which straw you're going to draw. In Blue Valentine, Cindy clings to the short one for as long as she can bear it -- and Williams shows us just how much it costs her to let go.