True ‘Blue Valentine’

In theaters Friday: X-Men: First Class

New on DVD/Blu-ray: Biutiful, Drive Angry

There is a certain category of drama that is hard to watch but somehow all the better for it. I call them Untouchables. How many times do you have to watch the same movie anyway? Sometimes once is enough. These are not DVDs to be kept polished on the shelf and pulled out on nights when absolutely nothing is on TV. For me, Untouchables are films that don’t so much stay with you as bore a hole into your very core.

You contemplate them. You turn them over in your head. But you don’t dare watch them again. Not today anyway. Maybe when you’re “in the mood” for it, whatever unfortunate day in the future that will be. Closer, Dancer in the Dark, Requiem for a Dream and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are each this type of film for me. I love these movies, but don’t quiz me on them, because it has been years since I’ve seen any of them.

Now they have company. At times drastic, dire and whimsical, Blue Valentine is a daring achievement in film, and what it lacks in plot and character development it makes up for in moments of sheer, spontaneous magic caught like an unfolding documentary by director Derek Cianfrance.

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams star as a young couple. A working class mover and creatively-minded high school dropout, Gosling falls hard for the bookish, middle class future physician’s assistant Williams at first sight. His courting of her is playful and sincere, and when faced with a surprising situation and a terrible decision, the young couple chooses to forge a life together for better or worse.

Fast forward 10 years, and they have a daughter who seems to be the only thing holding them together. Gosling’s vibrant spirit is dampened by daily alcohol abuse. To Williams, the creativity and artistic talent he still shows remains only as a monument to his lost potential. To Gosling, Williams appears cold and closed off to his affection. He’s fighting for the relationship in his own broken way. She’s fleeing the battlefield in retreat.

Blue Valentine is a film about falling in and out of love, an examination of the best and worst of two characters that appear so fragile and likable in the flashback sections of the film that want to pull them like magnets back together and to happier times. It reminded me of reading the first few chapters of a book then skipping to the very end. The film has no middle, and because of that we do not see any of the long slow slide into trouble their relationship takes.

Far from fatalistic, the movie offers the slightest glimmers of hope while delving into dark, almost harrowing territory filled with rejection, longing and guilt. With astounding performances by Gosling and Williams, an atmospheric soundtrack by Brooklyn melody machines Grizzly Bear, Blue Valentine feels like the greatest mumblecore movie ever made. It’s not a pretty sight, but somehow beautiful all the same.