Blue Valentine is the story of young love, and the struggle to keep it alive through the stresses of everyday life. This film, starring Ryan Gosling (The Notebook) and Michelle Williams (Shutter Island) as a young married couple worn from a tumultuous relationship, only saw limited release due to its graphic sexual nature.
Its original rating of NC-17 was challenged, and eventually the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) awarded the film an R rating, although this did not result in a widened release of the film. Directed by Derek Cianfrance, a Sundance favorite known for his controversial documentaries, and written by Cianfrance, Cami Delevigne, and Joey Curtis; Blue Valentine created a stir at its premier at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, and has since been nominated for numerous awards including Best Performance by an Actor/Actress in a Drama at the Golden Globes.
Easy to relate to but not always easy to watch, Blue Valentine tells a story disturbingly familiar to many couples in America today. Cindy (Williams) is a young, beautiful, but overworked nurse married to Dean (Gosling) an alcoholic high school dropout, wasting his extreme musical and intellectual talent by painting houses for a living. They share a daughter Frankie, who is not biologically Dean’s child. The story of their relationship and segments of their individual pasts are shown to the audience by flashing back periodically to their teenage lives. You learn of Dean’s broken family and his desire to care for his own wife and child, and Cindy’s father’s dominance over her meek mother, creating an equally dysfunctional background. Cindy and Dean meet and fall in love immediately after a breakup with an ex-boyfriend which ultimately severely affects her relationship with Dean. Their stories culminate in a one-night-getaway to a cheap motel, where Cindy begins to come to terms with her true feelings for her husband.
The shockingly realistic sex scenes leave an air of disturbance and emotional strain on the audience, and the sensitive dynamics between the characters create a feeling of impending breakdown throughout the film. The characters are each greatly endeared to you, making it difficult to watch their passionate struggles. I myself have never been married or raised a child, but after viewing this film I have a new sense of empathy for people who have to experience those relationships change. I have seen the breaking of a family from the child’s point of view, and this film gave me the vantage point of the people doing the breaking. Conclusively, those are much more difficult eyes to look through. My emotional disturbance as a result of this film was equal to that of watching a movie in which a character experiences the death of a loved one. The camera angles, lighting, costuming, and set all contributed to the realistic feeling of Blue Valentine. This is not a film to see when looking for an uplifting love story, but the thought-provoking nature of it will capture the attention of any viewer.
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