A couple of weeks ago, Showtime was having a free preview weekend. I looked through their schedule of movies and found a few that I wanted to see, so I recorded them. Blue Valentine was one such movie, only due to the fact that it stars Ryan Gosling. I knew nothing about the movie before I started to watch it. Honestly, I thought it was a romantic comedy. I couldn't have been more wrong. For the summary of the movie, go here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1120985/
(I should preface this review by saying while I watched it, I was suffering from a terrible case of insomnia and the movie didn't put me to sleep - so that's a pretty good telling of the quality of the movie.)
The end of the movie left me feeling unfulfilled and maybe that's just because I'm a girl who loves a happy ending and this one never came. When I step back from what I wanted the movie to be and look at what the writer wanted me to see, the movie was well done. It's a movie that I will watch only once as it is not a feel good movie. The performances by both Gosling and Williams are superb - but the movie depicts the arc of a relationship and poses more questions than it answers. Both of these individuals have idealized visions of love even though neither come from backgrounds where examples of such love are available. Gosling's character (Dean) comes from a broken home. He's a high school drop out and his father is a janitor. He hasn't see his mother since his parent's divorce when he was ten.
Williams character's (Cindy) parents remain in a loveless marriage. In each other, through a whirlwind, though short, romance, they think they find their one true love. The viewer is shown the beginning of their relationship interspersed with the current day problems that they face. I found myself rooting for them all the while knowing that there were problems that could not be overcome. The movie ended the way it should have. I saw no realistic way for the writers to give me the happy ending I so craved; even though, I was tempted to believe as Dean pleads with Cindy to give him another chance, to tell him what he needs to do, to keep the promise that she made to see him through the good times and the bad, as he points out, this is "his worst." We know just by the building of Cindy's character that there's no way she can accept this. She doesn't want to tell him how he needs to be; she thinks that by now, he should know. What she wants out of life and what he wants out of life are things we don't see them talk about before marriage and while Cindy tries to discuss these issues during the marriage, she learns that Dean will never want out of life what she does. It's an insurmountable conflict and one I'm glad that the makers of the movie did not skirt around.
The movie left me thinking, so while this is no where near a movie I would say is a favorite, I can appreciate what the filmmakers were trying to do and would recommend that people see it.
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