Review of Blue Valentine (2010) by James H — 24 Jan 2017

Blue Valentine is a good diverge of regular romance stories that includes a snappy screenplay, good direction and brilliant acting. Cianfrance knows when to apply humour (which works to great affect due to Goslings brilliant comedic timing in particular) and when you make the tone more serious. Ryan Gosling is fantastic, he's almost playing two different characters, one charming and playful, the other unstable and kind of childish. Michelle Williams' character seems to always be moody apart from about 10 minutes of the film but she plays it well. Cianfrance trusts his audience with the film and allows us to figure things out for ourselves without telling us why things are as they are straight away. Switching between the two time zones is a little bit frustrating though as it changed the part of the story right when I was getting into the current one a couple of times towards the beginning. The only other problem I have is a spoiler related one so I'll put it below and you can read if you want, or not if you haven't seen it yet.

They never properly mention whose child Frankie is. I think Dean knew it wasn't his but you never actually see any proper reaction and his relationship is so close to Frankie that I couldn't be one-hundred percent sure.