Musings on Blue Valentine
We’re all familiar with the tragedy of love that’s truncated by the limitations of time, class, age and race, but what about the tragedy of love that’s allowed to go on too long? What happens, in other words, when Romeo and Juliet get the chance to grow old together?
That’s the question that Blue Valentine seeks to address and the answer is, of course, devastating. The thesis of the movie could be All Good Things End Eventually (Which Sucks) or All Good Things End Eventually (Which Sucks) But At Least You Were Young, Beautiful, and In Love at One Point, Right?
The movie lays down the story through a comparison of two snapshot moments in a couple’s life – the moments when they were falling in love, and the final days when they admit that it’s over. One thing I like about this movie is though Things Happen, nothing seems like a plot device; as in life, small events, like the death of a dog, can spiral into larger consequences in a way that’s breathtakingly mundane. The script for the dying relationship reads like a Raymond Carver short story – life just happening, and it’s awful.
The love story of the young couple is so brimming with life and hope that the death we witness is even more horrific. With each return to the past, you find yourself looking for the clues that the relationship will fail, searching for early signs of the cancer that’s raging in the relationship of the older pair. You may find them, but only in glimpses; both Michelle Williams’ and Ryan Gosling’s characters come from dysfunctional families, and in some scenes, they cling to each other like scared and broken creatures. The young Ryan Gosling is a carefree, even reckless, spirit and the young Michelle Williams is, at times, guarded and cagey. As with all of us, these inchoate traits become exagerrated with age, as we blossom into the sad characters that populate the best novels, and most city streets.
The older Gosling is a drunk without ambition, but a great father, and the older Michelle Williams is hard-working, but burdened and cold. Their pathologies are so intertwined that it becomes impossible to lay blame at either’s feet; is Williams cold because Gosling is drunk? Or does Gosling drink because Williams shuts him out? Without all the moments in between these two snapshots in time, we are left entirely uncertain about these mysteries. Similarly, it’s unusually difficult to decide how you want things to turn out for these two. It seems silly and unrealistic to wish for them to work things out, but having seen them as young lovers, it’s impossible to wish for them to live apart. We feel as they feel in their final scene, and as anyone who’s ever broken up with anyone has felt, torn between a wish for what’s impossible and a realization of what’s actual. It’s not just the heartache of a failing relationship, it’s the tragedy of growing up that’s addressed here. If I wasn’t so busy being inspired that something like this can actually get made in Hollywood, I would have been incredibly depressed.
