Blue Valentine

Blue Valentine is an impressionistic portrait of a young couple, full of mimetic nuance and hazy beauty. The narrative juxtaposes fragments from the lithe early days of the relationship between young lovers Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) with the flabby paunch it becomes. The film's characterisation, particularly the way Dean and Cindy's younger selves feed into their current selves, slightly reminded me of Jonathan Franzen's much-lauded Freedom, a Bayeux tapestry of a novel that provides painstaking, neo-Tolstoyian backgrounds for each of its protagonists and interweaves them: this is more pared-down, of course, but with the same interest in the germination of personalities, the degradation of the American family unit and the potential of even the most virtuous character traits - idealism, playfulness, hard work - to wilt or fester: it is an intensive dual-character study, a cinematic novella, the spare, frustrated authenticity of whose dialogue recalls the short stories of Raymond Carver. Sex throughout the film is, for the most part, brusque, dissonant or apathetic: those grim scenes in the motel, and the shower scene especially, are horribly true to that wonderful description of unreciprocated male lust in The Waste Land:

Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

 

Ryan Gosling belongs (along with Sam Rockwell, Mark Ruffalo, Casey Affleck and, the most promising of them all, James Franco) to that new wave of soulful, sleepy-eyed leading men who steal every film they are in. He is particularly engaging here: witty and optimistic as the young Dean; frayed, receding and irreverent (bordering on immature) years later. He is also very funny, even in the more serious scenes. Michelle Williams is equally impressive, her sweet and spontaneous loyalty to Dean giving way to a sort of jaded, passive-aggressive lethargy: she has got to the stage where she is too tired to be a mother or a wife, and yet an unexpected encounter in a supermarket with Bobby, her baleful high school sweetheart, provides a perverse flutter of excitement.

The potential problem with a film like this is it risks creeping into the territory of self-indulgent ‘actor vehicle’ (Gosling and Williams are both credited as executive producers). But the script manages to resist this: for instance, in a scene where Michelle Williams turns up late to her daughter's school play, Dean, rather than hector her for being late as you might expect, pauses and asks her gently what the matter is. Whilst the early scenes are lit more warmly than the later ones, director Derek Cianfrance's emotional palette within the two canvases is more fickle and ambiguous (the rapture of a comedy taxi driver one minute, the agony of an abortion clinic the next). He tempers the joy of the young lovers, and the vicarious joy the audience feels for them, with ironic glimpses of their future together. Their garbled final row, where what leaves the characters' mouths are less words than raw, escaped snatches of feeling, where there is so much left to say that is left unsaid, is a highly articulate depiction of inarticulacy and the final shot is fittingly enigmatic.

Blue Valentine is, all in all, a fascinating, bleak and literate meditation on marriage, young love and the frictions between the two, with a subtle, potent score from Grizzly Bear that blossoms in the final credits. If Mike Leigh's Another Year extolled the cosy notion of marital bliss, Blue Valentine defiles it. It is a less self-consciously stylised reinvention of the romance genre than last year’s zesty, if superficial 500 Days of Summer (whose zenith was the inspired, split-screen contrast of "Expectations" and "Reality"), but perhaps even more subversive in its maturity, uncertainty, and canny admixture of reality and idealism. An artful, emotional fable that deserves to be seen, but perhaps not on a first date.