Watched Blue Valentine recently and I must say, I don't particularly care for these tales of desiccated love and broken marriages. The better they are, the more likely they are to make you lose all faith in the idea of true love and everlasting happiness. And Blue Valentine will leave you depressed as hell.A few years ago, we had Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road, a similar story of a couple with divergent ambitions and aspirations, albeit based in a different era. Where Revolutionary Road explored the subterranean turbluence in the lives of a seemingly happily married couple, perfectly complementing the visually charming veneer of the '50s and the eponymous street where the couple lived, Blue Valentine is a contemporary and far more visceral portrayal of marital breakdown.
Much like Revolutionary Road, the characters are starkly real. Dean, portayed to perfection by Ryan Gosling, is an unambitious high school drop-out living off part-time paint jobs (and already seems to have a rapidly receding hairline in his late twenties or early thirties). Michelle Williams, in her Oscar-nominated performance, plays wife Cindy, who was a supposedly bright medical student before getting married to Dean, but is now employed as a nurse with a small clinic. If Dean and Cindy were real, you'd say they were not meant to be together. It's as simple as that. And this is where Blue Valentine is fundamentally different from Mendes' film. In Revolutionary Road, Winslet's and DiCaprio's characters were not particularly incompatible, but rather, victims of circumstance and the societal obligations and restrictions imposed on them by the times they lived in. They were victims of the '50s.
But Dean and Cindy are victims of an unplanned pregnancy and puppy love that clearly wasn’t meant to last. Even the sex isn't great any more as we see in the scene where Cindy winces in apparent pain as Dean tries to make love to her.
It’s not all that subtle, however. After a night of horribly failed attempts to rekindle their dying passion in a seedy motel room, Cindy abandons a sleeping Dean to go to work. A disappointed and grossly inebriated Dean turns up at the clinic to get Cindy to talk to him. Upset with his behaviour, Cindy turns him away enraging Dean to the extent that he ends up attacking her boss when he tries to intervene. Cindy gets fired.
But Dean is not the bad guy here. Nor is Cindy for that matter. Both might be perfectly lovable characters by themselves, but they are destroying each other piece by piece by just being together, which is a tragic turnaround (to say the least) from when their relationship began 6-7 years ago.
There is, however, a particularly touching moment when you see in them the last vestiges of love and respect for their relationship. After the fight at the clinic, as Cindy and Dean are rushing out of the hospital, Cindy tells him she wants a divorce. Overcome with anger, Dean pulls the wedding ring off his finger and throws it on the kerb. But just as they're pulling out of the parking lot, Dean jumps out of the car and starts looking for the ring. Confused and hesitant at first, Cindy, too, starts rummaging around in the nearby bushes with her husband to recover the ring. This was, perhaps, the only moment in the entire film when one felt that there was still hope.
But there was none.
Both Blue Valentine and Revolutionary Road present a brutal and utterly bleak insight into romantic relationships that peaked too early, to the extent that it's almost clinical and devoid of feeling. Sure, the characters were lovable at one point, but they aren't any more. They are just ugly, angry ghosts of a beautiful past long forgotten. In Revolutionary Road, they are transformed into two jaded and highly complex creatures, so intent on being unhappy in their relationship that the best way they know of punishing the other is to punish themselves. The eventual culmination of this twisted relationship was horrifying and heartbreaking.
The characters in Blue Valentine are far simpler and so is their relationship. Director Derek Cianfrance set out to tell a story of love and heartbreak, but as Dean walked off into the distance, crying in the final frames of the movie, I did not feel my heart break, but rather, a sense of melancholic relief knowing that both of them would be better off without each other.
P.S.: I know I'm not the first one to say this, but Ryan Gosling was robbed of a truly deserved Oscar nomination last year.
