Dean (Ryan Gosling – The Notebook) is an idealistic dreamer/slacker who has started a new job as a removal man. During a routine job out of town he stumbles across Cindy (Michelle Williams – Dawson’s Creek), a driven young woman who at first isn’t interested in him but soon falls for Dean’s persistent charms. What follows is a breakdown of their relationship, sometimes told in flashbacks, as we learn what drew these two people together in the first place and poses the question of what happens to a relationship when love isn’t enough.
Blue Valentine is an unflinching, realistic take on love and relationships. It turns out to be a film heavy on artistic merit and emotional upheaval, but light on actual romance. With the release of Blue Valentine on Blu-Ray this week, audiences have a chance to take a closer look at this bleak love story and the avant-garde filming genius of helmer Derek Cianfrance.
A Life in Equinox writes:
It seems that the basic criteria for writing a review of Blue Valentine is that you open up with a melancholic prose on the destructive power of a dying relationship. Some go the doom and gloom route on how all relationships are a facade and to love is to embrace its inevitable demise. As the child to parents who have been married for thirty years, and the grandson to grandparents who've been married for sixty, that's one ticket I'm not buying. Nor am I buying the alternative viewpoint that all is bubblegum that it's really sad that these two just couldn't work it out.
TGE:
There is a pantheon of relationship-based films in which every character is truly and deeply dislikeable. Films like Mike Nichol’s Closer or Todd Field’s Little Children; movies that explore the ugliness of human relationships, hoping to transcend them, but that just as often fall victim to their unsympathetic characters. At first glance, Blue Valentine could be easily classed among this type of film: a realist (even neo-realist) take on a flailing contemporary relationship. Blue Valentine, however, saves itself from tedium and self-indulgence with one simple, narrative stroke: By giving us, the audience, a glimpse of the happy-go-lucky, well-intentioned origins of its characters’ relationship.
