More Mumble Than Core
Blue Valentine
Directed by Derek Cianfrance
Runtime: 114 min.
Derek Cianfrance, writer-director of Blue Valentine, and his collaborating actors Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, show themselves to be sexual and artistic naifs. They try reinventing The Catherine Wheel, the 1981 David Byrne-Twyla Tharp ballet about spiritual dysfunction, by using the unsophisticated terms of sophomoric film students: “Hey, lets improvise a couple’s emotional misconnections, their sexual competition and inherited ideas about relationships.”
New generations may not know The Catherine Wheel, but Cianfrance, Williams and Gosling might have been far more successful had they been familiar with our artistic heritage and not tried to plumb the depths of romance out of their own limited, unformed feelings. With study and guidance, this trio might have developed a less tentative narrative and avoided Blue Valentine’s selfcongratulatory tone about things previous artists have already braved.
Instead, Cianfrance, Williams and Gosling expect viewers to be fascinated with the ordinary saga of Cindy and Dean, a young couple with a small daughter, coming to realize the complexities of adult relationships. Blue Valentine can only seem novel to moviegoers dealing with puberty or just discovering their own sexual morality; it can’t feel fresh to anyone who ever saw its 1950s version Blue Denim with Brandon De Wilde and Carol Lynley, or Hunter Richards’ London, Marcos Siega’s Chaos Theory or the pinnacle of sexual-emotional crisis, Bertolucci’s 1972 Last Tango in Paris. Though it’s praise to even mention Bertolucci’s masterwork in connection to this pro-am production, it helps gauge Cianfrance, Williams and Gosling’s naive sincerity.
Blue Valentine proves to be of its moment in the scene where Dean and Cindy try to repair their broken romance by booking a liaison in a sex motel’s blue-toned Future Room. The setting measures their relationship in carnal, post-porn terms while imposing a fateful time limit. Cianfrance’s elliptical, time-shifting style stumbles through a haze of romance (“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” is a more pertinent musical theme here than in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, but a pop, Catherine Wheel-like music motif is needed). Yet this long, painful sequence is the center of the film: a psychic space where two young adults confuse their sexual license and emotional uncertainty. Here is where she finally vents about his lack of ambition and attempts to screw her way out of guilt and obligation; it’s a literal, universally recognizable fuck-off.
Dean and Cindy’s lustful tug-of-war most resembles the bickering couple Ronnie and Sammi in Jersey Shore: As post adolescents embarked on the privileges and autonomy of adult sexuality, they can’t prevent falling in and out of love, lust and forbearance. Like Ronnie and Sammi’s backand-forth recriminations, Blue Valentine uses a convoluted narrative, casually folding-in the past and present chronology of Dean and Cindy’s story. There are felicitous rhymes: Cindy’s abortion recall juxtaposes a memory of tenderness when she and Dean suggest, “Lets make a family.” But while this indefinite storytelling seems artful, it offers little insight into average, working-class romantic drudgery.
A kind of class romanticism is implicit in Dean and Cindy’s averagenessthat is, Gosling and Williams’s attempt at naturalistic behavior. Cianfrance’s dawdling realism and torturous structure aren’t truer than conventionally plotted love stories; it’s merely a way of making a break-up seem less banal. Blue Valentine comes on the tail of mumblecore narcissism and though Cianfrance demonstrates more technical assurance than any director in that movement (the dialogue is recorded with delicious intimacy), fact is, his actors provide better mumbling than core.
Despite Blue Valentine’s blatant sensememories of nakedness and affection, irritation and itch, what Gosling and Williams reveal about their own concepts of heterosexual experience is ultimately inane. Their only breakthrough is getting rawer and nuder than the stars of Love and Other Drugs. Young viewers might recognize the feminine tears and masculine defensiveness but this is superficial identification. Ronnie and Sammi’s reality-TV self-exploitation mattered more; it simply lacked Cianfrance’s poetic affectation. Cianfrance’s name suggests an explanation: He’s going for the French tradition which Bertolucci alluded to in Last Tango in Paris and that Hunter Richards evoked in the startling sensual love-lost arias of London (where Chris Evans, Jessica Biel, Jason Statham and Joy Bryant made sex and fractured time combustible). Cianfrance’s approach resembles the wan narratives of Christophe Honor yet still falls short of the full range of life and social experience. It’s not as narcissistic as Before Sunrise or Before Sunset, but it’s just as insular.
Michelle Williams represents contemporary girlish confusion as Cindy, whose advanced sexual history ironically exposes her sensitivity, but Gosling’s insufferable posturing makes Blue Valentine seem worse than it is. Gosling doesn’t hit Ronnie’s perfect note of macho ignorance on Jersey Shore, just acting-class notions of proletarian machismo. Gosling may be aiming for Brando in Last Tango, but he misfires like Edward Norton.