At the Movies: "Blue Valentine"

Now that Oscar season is upon us, I'm in my usual rush to see many movies.  True Grit? Cool. The Fighter? Interesting. And Blue Valentine?  Absolutely brilliant.

The film premiered at Sundance last year, after a many years journey to raise sufficient cash.  That indie cred shines through in a story that is honest, often funny, and ultimately deeply sad.  There is no way to soften the pain of watching young love fade. 

Michelle Williams plays Cindy and Ryan Gosling plays Dean, two working-class kids who meet by chance and fall in love.  When they meet Dean works for a moving company and takes extra care to make an older man named Walter feel at home when he moves Walter to a nursing home.  In the kindest gesture Dean carefully displays Walter's matchbox collection on one wall of the small room.  Turns out that Cindy's grandmother is living in a room across the hall, and Cindy is visiting as Dean is chatting with Walter.  The two meet and some sparks fly.  They bump into each other randomly again a few months later, and this time the relationship takes off.

But there were always big challenges.  Dean never graduated from high school, a fact Cindy's father draws out when Dean first meets her family.  And Cindy--although she is self-directed and eventually becomes a nurse--becomes pregnant as a teenager (not from Dean, it was before they were together) and has to choose between abortion or becoming a mother.  She almost has the abortion--Dean takes her to the clinic--but decides to have her daughter Frankie.  Dean helps Cindy raise Frankie and treats her as his own daughter. They get married at city hall.

Things unravel as time goes on.  Cindy stays focused while Dean starts drinking, never having steady jobs or finding a creative outlet for his musical gifts. Eventually Dean arranges a romantic tryst that he hopes will jumpstart the marriage, even though it's at a cheesy sex motel and Cindy doesn't want to go.  But the night goes terribly; for one thing, it becomes clear that Dean wants a child of his own even though he and Cindy don't have the money. Cindy has to leave in the middle of the night because she's on call at her clinic, a fact that enrages Dean when he wakes up.  He gets back home and becomes even more belligerent than he was already, and the circle grows more vicious from there.

Very depressing, I know.  But also true, vivid, and real.  Gosling and Williams are both amazing; we know that Dean and Cindy loved each other deeply once, and we know that the memory of the happy days are no longer enough. There is never a false note between them, and all the threads of the story connect. 

Back to Dean and Walter. I loved Dean's great attention to Walter because it shows his caring nature.  And after all, this is a man who had no trouble raising a child who wasn't his.  His eventual drunken rages would be tough to take in any case, but are especially hard here because we know the decency Dean is capable of. Now there's a cautionary tale for all of us. The best movies don't make things easy for us. They make us better.