Review of Blue Valentine (2010) by Shiira — 05 Feb 2011

The dog isn't moving; he's not the only thing that's dead, but she'll deal with her blue heart later on. First things first, there's the blue dog to deal with. Cindy(Michelle Williams) discovers him on the other side of the highway, presumably hit by a moving vehicle, or maybe it was fate.

Perhaps the floodgates were overdue for an opening. Little does she know it, but her bad morning is only going to get worse. While the still body lies in the trunk, Cindy walks down a deserted school hallway; it's a walk of shame, the finishing touch on a life gone horribly wrong.

Inside the crowded auditorium, her daughter's pageant is already in progress. She's late, in more ways than one, and not for the first time. Six years ago, when her younger self was late, Cindy almost had an abortion.

She was going to be somebody, a doctor; she really should be somewhere else, but the baby was his, so she called off the procedure. The nurse has been living with the consequences of that decision ever since.

She's late again, but this time, it's a relief. Her pageant, this marriage in trouble, isn't worth saving. When Cindy breaks the news to Dean(Ryan Gosling), the directionless man she had wedded out of love, the broken woman accouters him with the ammo he needs for retaliation.

Dean knows that he disappoints her. The housepainter berates her inexorably for not locking the dog's gate. It's his golden opportunity to point out that Cindy can be a f*ck-up too. Accused of being a child just hours ago, due to his lack of gravitas at the breakfast table, Dean proves her right, when instead of being there at a moment of crisis to provide comfort and understanding for her animal-related transgression, he plays the blame game, like some petulant boy, and makes his wife cry even harder.

Outside the school, Frankie(Faith Wladyka) asks about the dog, and rather than give her a straight answer, he tells his daughter that the family pet decided to head out west to try his luck at being a "movie dog".

Cindy says nothing; she lets her husband's sugar-coated lie hang in the air. Any questions that Frankie may have concerning life and death will have to be postponed 'til a later date. For now, there are more pressing matters to deal with.

Unbeknownst to Dean, but by evoking Hollywood, and more pointedly, dreams, he opens up a can of worms; he tears the lid off of Pandora's Box. Back at the house, as a home movie featuring Megan plays on the television in memoriam, Cindy makes a connection, and suddenly, their marriage is irrevocably wrecked, overrun with worms and a laundry list of unmanageable problems.

Harking back to Dean's rehashing of a Dino-centric episode of "The Flintstones", she can plainly see, fiction be damned, how Megan never made it to Hollywood. It serves as a painful reminder that the once-promising medical student never lived up to her potential either, dropping out of college like she did after making her future husband's acquaintance.

And now, Cindy pays attention to her blue heart, as she fights the interspecies transferrence with all her might. She doesn't want to end up like the dog, whom Dean buried in the backyard of their modest rental.

Cindy becomes deathly afraid of her husband's shovel; she doesn't want to live and die here. She doesn't want to be next. Therefore, Dean's timing couldn't be any worse when he makes reservations at a cheap motel, where they spend a night in the ironically named Future Room, since the future is both a present which her past self could never have imagined, and a myriad of hypotheticals that Cindy wants to tackle on her own.

"Blue Valentine", a movie whose narrative goes backward and forward in time, shows how hindisight can sometimes be one big fallacy. The evidence shows that she was powerless to his charms. The flashbacks tell the story of her doom.

After all, the warning signs were there, absolute dead giveaways that Dean was the rebound, the antidote to her college boyfriend, a real jerk, and not the man she was supposed to marry, but alas, whom she ended up loving too much.

Memories are ephemeral, they don't pay the rent and put food on the table, and Cindy is paying the price for getting involved with a lovable, but shiftless townie, and yet, she has these memories, moments of pure bliss that some people may never get to experience.

For instance, her grandmother, who answers in the negative to Cindy's question about ever having been in love. From the old woman's point of view, Cindy is blessed. And from our point of view, we may feel the same way, too.