Blue New Year

BLUE VALENTINE comes out December 31st, 2010. Spoilers below, so if you’re interested in this film (and you should be) wait till you see it before reading.

**

Despite the waterworks of tears BLUE VALENTINE is almost systematically-designed to illicit—especially with a New Years release date, preying on the bleary-eyed nostalgia and half-hopes of its audience – it is a film that concerns itself with a particularly desiccating process: the evaporation of true love, and the writhing corpse of a once-great relationship left drying in the harsh sun.

Its sad, for sure, but not because it strives to be depressing or because it heralds the dramatic failure of true, passionate love. We know from the beginning this couple is broken. The tragedy of BLUE VALENTINE is not that they are out of love now, but just how deeply they were in it. It’s a smart, if not wholly original take on the process of exploring “what went wrong” – show it all wrong, then show how very right it once was. This isn’t manipulative; this is life, a vessel of sadness, constantly being filled. So, to use a terminological approach, BLUE VALENTINE is tristful, full of sad things, without being lugubrious, excessively dismal. Its realism is one of its central pillars; perhaps THE pillar that elevates it and makes it a good film (maybe not a GREAT film, maybe an overhyped one, but a film people—people who can stomach this much reality— need to see).

A husband and wife in the throes of a divorce, and then flashbacks to see how happy they once were. If this sounds uncharacteristically simple for a feature film plot, that’s because it is, and this is one of the film’s great strengths. More than almost any film this year, BLUE VALENTINE’s success comes down to the performances of its chief players, and it’s a wildly successful turn for both cutiepie Michelle Williams and hipster-sexy Ryan Gosling, the latter channeling a chain-smoking Marlon Brando in his rough charm. Even if Gosling is a bit too attractive to buy as a bluecollar lugger-of-boxes along the waterfront, we must remember Brando was as well. He chews on his lines just enough, given them some masticated authenticity that works for him and for the movie. Williams is a bit more understated and almost defensively so; the film asks much more of her than Gosling, positioning her as both a villain and a tragic hero, and featuring her in some of the more intense, controversial scenes.

Still, for its familiar, paired-down plot there’s a very interesting thematic moment here, albeit one that’s unfortunately practically spelled out in dialogue, where the assumption that a man who doesn’t cheat on his wife and who is a good father to their child should be enough for any woman – which is a really anti-feminist, inflammatory idea. And one that I think is part of the natural emotional response to the film – he TOOK HER DAUGHTER IN! He is so SWEET WITH THE LITTLE GIRL (even though he’s constantly puffing smoke in her face). He is SO ROMANTIC! And what’s Michelle William’s response? She’s bored. She wants the jock who was an asshole to her all along. She listless and hysterical and emotionally distant. What a bitch! Doesn’t BLUE VALENTINE blame her for the couple’s irreconcilable disconnect? Isn’t she the one who has changed?

I’m not so sure, and here is where the performances, and the film, succeeds. The film ends with an ironic barrage of fireworks (so loud, so celebratory, here at the quietly bitter end) – but it ends brilliantly, because even though you know this relationship is over—really over—you don’t quite know whose fault it is. It transcends fault. And that’s even sadder. I think it's interesting that the inclination is to blame her, because her malaise feels so disproportionate to Gosling's actual crimes (what, he likes to drink? He's a bit lazy?) But who is anyone to judge how much someone should love another? How can we actually know what it feels like? We can't, and so blame isn't quite so easy to assign.

So there’s something a bit retro and definitely refreshing about this small film, as focused as a laser, but still one that will allow fun and a bit of humor to leak into even the gravest scenes. I’m no expert in the Nineties (I can’t tell you if Guns ‘N Roses or Aerosmith wrote SWEET CHILD OF MINE -- which is like, surely, some sort of litmus test), but something about the sweetness of the romance here reminds me a lot more of films like GROUNDHOGS DAY than the lovey-dovey shits that Penny Marshall pinches out into the Toilet Bowl of current cinema. Sure, the bleak, not-exactly-life-affirming ending is more of an indie film’s response to the blithely sunny nineties (post-Smith, post-Harmony Korine), but there aren’t many films like BLUE VALENTINE with big stars like Williams and Gosling in them. And I think, for all it’s hype, it’s worth making ourselves a bit sad over. Because at least that’s something. Unlike IT’S COMPLICATED, it isn’t very complicated, it’s just sort of real, and that’s kind of nice.