Director Derek Cianfrance ‘s romance works on the premise that subtlety is everything. That quirks and facial expression can do more than actual dialogue can achieve. But it also helps if you tell a story that’s actually involving and engrossing. “Blue Valentine” is a film we’ve seen a thousand times around Oscar season. It’s the experimental drama about a couple in turmoil struggling to regain that spark. We saw it with “American Beauty” to some regard, we saw it with “Revolutionary Road,” we saw it with “The Good Girl” and lord almighty we’re seeing it again. This time, “Blue Valentine” is about the choices in our lives and how sometimes we can make the wrong ones and not have any idea how to get out of the perpetual rut we’re in. The characters of Dean and Cindy are a couple whose strengths are based around habit and routine.
They are so fit in their routine that everything is purely based on reflex and not so much gut instinct. Even the love of their daughter is based around treating her as a chore where they have to get her handled and ready for school and on to the next task they have to topple. But when Cindy begins to lose her memory, her feelings that she may have ended up in a loveless marriage begin to rise to the surface. This is where Derek Cianfrance’s story becomes jumbled and awfully confusing, especially when he shifts from the past to the present within mere seconds. Moments I assumed were in the past were actually the present and vice versa. Cianfrance’s entire premise is centered on chronicling the romance of these two individuals, both of whom fell in love with falling in love, and never quite knew one another.
This is a couple constantly on the precipice of breaking apart and tearing their world down and yet somehow they always find a reason to keep moving forward. And most times that’s all relationships are. Finding a reason to move forward everyday. However minimal it may be to one or both people in the relationship. Shots linger on for minutes on end with two characters I barely could connect with no matter how empathic their conflict was, and when the film actually does manage to garner some forward motion, it instead reverts back to being a glossy mopey picture about two folks who slowly figure out they may have grown apart.
I appreciated Cianfrance’s motivation to display quaint often minimalist moments between characters who all ride on in-jokes between one another, and the same old routine they convince themselves is happiness, but “Blue Valentine” is a polarizing and often one dimensional piece of filmmaking that is much too conveniently Oscar material to be taken as more than that, in the end. I wanted to love this film and the characters surrounding it, but all I could do was look at the clock and ponder on the fact that I’ve been here before, and I’ve done this almost a dozen times. Except I’ve witnessed it done much better than this. I respect director Derek Cianfrance for conveying the disgusting truth about love and marriage and how often times we fall in love with falling in love and never quite understand or feel a sense of passion toward our partners. Love is bullshit. I agree. Would it have been so hard to compose a more compelling film about that very truth?