Blue Valentine

Blue Valentine, pretty small town girl meets nutter with a ukulele and he falls in love, whilst she marries him for convenience... kind of. Happens all the time, just without the ukulele. This nutter though, does appear to quite charming. Well I liked him, at first.

What follows is a kind of a weighty relationship study. Several years Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy’s (Michelle Williams) marriage is failing. They both know its failing but they just haven't quite reached the endpoint yet. He seems to want it to continue, she doesn’t.



The story of everything falling apart is told in parallel with the story of them/him falling in love. See I’m not convinced she ever loved him. We see how they met and how they fell for each other. In his case at first sight. In her case after he stalked her on the bus with a ukulele with lines like ‘In my experience, the prettier a girl is, the more nuts she is, which makes you insane’. She seems amused and sort of flattered that he can ‘compliment and insult somebody at the same time, in equal measure’.

He’s more nuts than she is though. Later he strums said ukulele in a shop doorway whilst warbling eccentrically the song ‘You Always Hurt the Ones You Love’, which should have been a warning to both of them, but it works, he pulls the girl and gets into her knickers. Which is impressively quick work until we find out that she’s had 'about' 25 partners from the age of 13.



Dean doesn’t know this though, so it comes as a bit of a shock to him when she almost instantly announces that she’s pregnant. Not that it’s his of course but courtesy of the guy she’s been hanging around with before Dean.

When she goes for an abortion and we learn about her promiscuity, we wonder why it’s taken her so long to get caught out? It’s an abortion she finds she can’t go through with and aborts the procedure part way through. Luckily for her Saint Dean is all too willing to devote his life to the gorgeous girl he’s just met and her unborn child, even after getting beat up by the biological father. So he marries her and raises her daughter as she’s his own.



Back in the present, we see their relationship deteriorate further. Cindy is stressed out, overworked and claims to be raising her husband along with her daughter. He meanwhile still appears to be infatuated with her and puts up with more rejection than most people could stomach but for her, it’s clearly already all over. Cindy notes early on that her parents very quickly fell out of love with each and wondered how anyone can trust their feelings when they can just disappear like that? It’s like she was waiting for it to happen.

Yet he still tries to breathe life back in to their relationship with a perhaps ill advised and ill timed trip away to a motel for a night. She's not keen, not keen at all. Especially when it turns out the room they book is a futuristic themed room that looks like the inside of Dr. Who’s Tardis or as Dean describes it a ‘robot's vagina’. Perhaps romance died then.



Perhaps because I'm a man I look at Dean and wonder what it is that he did wrong. I felt sorry for him; on the surface he's done a lot for her but now she seemed to be out of gratitude and now more narked about what he hadn't done. Get a better job for instance. Although probably just so that she could afford to go back to medical school.

True, somewhere along the way, his character has changed. The nice guy started to smoke too much, drink way too much and become very short tempered. Here lies the problem with the film. Just when did this character change occur? When did their relationship suddenly go bad? There seemed to be a bit missing in the middle between the past and the present, a big bit.

Dean say early on about girls in general that 'they spend their whole life looking for Prince Charming and then they marry the guy who's got a good job and is going to stick around'. So perhaps he knew it wasn’t going to last. A better observation would have been 'don't marry someone you just met ten minutes ago and who is pregnant by someone else'.

Gosling and Williams are both very good in this, although only Williams got an Oscar nomination yesterday. The film itself, whilst a good watch, is flawed and nothing special, nothing we haven’t seen before, like say in Revolutionary Road. The film itself got a nomination in the now expanded list of ten Best Film nominations but if they’d stuck to the original five of old, I guess it wouldn’t have.

Revolutionary Road

It's the 1950's, Frank and April Wheeler, but we’ll call them Leo and Kate, are living the American dream in a nice suburb somewhere on Revolutionary Road. Everything seems great on the outside, but in reality neither is happy. Kate wanted to be an actress but she was crap at it so she became a housewife instead. Leo hates his office job but has no idea what else he could do instead. Leo at least livens up his dreary day by takes a dip in the typing pool but Kate, stuck at home, just becomes the bored housewife from hell and quivers that bottom lip, which has been cut and pasted from ‘The Reader’. Other than that, not much happens. It's rumoured they had kids but you only see them a couple of times, I think they got taken into care. It's perhaps all true to life but it makes odd cinema and it’s hard to feel sorry for either of them.



Then Kate suggests that they move to Paris, just because they can. They don’t have to be like everyone else in the suburbs. They can escape their rut of repetition and have a life instead. She'll work as a secretary for one of the big organizations whilst Leo becomes a kept man so that he can find himself. A good offer but Leo’s a bit sceptical, after all what's life without the typing pool, but Kate quivers that lip and talks him round.



Cue a few minutes of bliss and Leo even jumps her in the kitchen but it's probably not the best eighteen seconds (approx) of her life. Then it all falls apart, it's a costly eighteen seconds as Kate falls pregnant and Leo gets offered a, too good to turn down, promotion at work. The lip quivers some more and their relationship deteriorates. Of course had this film been set in the modern day, Kate would have just taken the boat tickets, the kids and gone.

Poor old Kate, looking a bit haggard I'm afraid, can't even get a decent shag. In frustration she indulges her neighbour Shep (get down boy) who has been panting after her even since they moved in. He takes his chance after Kate's had one too many one night but he can't even match up to Leo's standards.



Kate decides she wants rid of the baby and when the smoking and drinking heavily during pregnancy fails to work, she goes for the DIY home abortion kit instead. At the end you hope Kate is going to shoot herself, in fact you hope she shoots Leo first then herself but no, the abortion goes wrong and she bleeds to death. After Kate dies Leo is shown running down the street, presumably to the nearest bridge to throw himself off but that doesn't happen either. Depressing - yes, but nowhere near depressing enough.

Michael Shannon, steals the film as John, the mentally 'ill' neighbour who's been through the electric shock treatment. He tells it how it is and unsubtly hammers home the message but does it with panache. He was Oscar nominated for the role, where he lost out to that dead guy.

I have to say that my partner loved the film but then she's read the book, I got the impression that a lot of useful background information was missing, including all the character development. The film opens when Kate and Leo meet at a party and you are left to assume they actually liked each other at this point. Then almost immediately the film fast forwards seven years to when they hate each other. Cue lots of yelling and screaming. Whether this was a progressive falling out or whether they just woke up one day and smelt the coffee, I don't know, we’re not told. There are a couple of short flashbacks but any others must have ended up on the cutting room floor.



It's a very pretty, well made film but I can't help feeling it was just a vehicle for Kate and Leo. I think the story got lost somewhere along the way.