Last January at my first Sundance I discovered movie fatigue. Well, that’s what I thought at the time when I came out of a screening of ‘Blue Valentine’ extremely under whelmed, yet seemingly everyone else there was raving (!) about the film. Flash forward to now when the movie is on the big screen at the Multiplex and I felt the need to revisit it to see what, if anything, I missed.
Dean and Cindy are a young working-class married couple working hard simply to keep afloat. Dean was a high school drop out from a broken home whose ambition never exceeded beyond anything other than marrying Cindy who he fell in love with at first sight. That, and a few beers, maybe too occasionally. Cindy, also from a dysfunctional home, is a nurse but believes life has more to offer, which kind of sets at odds with her hubby. The movie flashes back and forth between the start of the relationship, and the 6 years in between, until the present time as if it is trying to remember what went wrong. It’s never really clear why they fell out of love, as it isn’t often in life off the screen, but they do, and that’s it , it’s over.
R.T.V. Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling are a truly delightful couple of very talented actors who make these characters their own, and with a real, sizzling chemistry between them. I guess Dean ( aka Ryan) is meant to be the villain of the piece, or the scapegoat for the failure of this marriage, but somehow to me it didn’t feel so.
I remember too why I reacted so at Sundance. I found as the movie constantly flashed between the past and the present its storytelling lost some of it clarity. This time it made more sense, but still a tad confusing, and it makes me upgrade my view of this charming wee movie, but I still wouldn’t ever have considered it as an Oscar Best Movie potential.
