Blue Valentine (2010)

Another film to see before the Oscars at the end of the month. Michelle Williams is nominated for best actress in Derek Cianfrance's low-budget ($1million) film shot in super 16mm. The tagline calls this "A Love Story." It is very much a 21st century romance about a typical sort of American couple. The story weaves flashbacks with the current life Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) to tell how they happened to become a married couple with an adorable young daughter named Meg. Events unfold around Brooklyn during a six or seven year timeframe.

The pair begin as fresh-faced young adults in their late teens. We see Cindy with high school boyfriend, Bobby (Mike Vogel) and caring tenderly for her elderly grandmother. Dean and Cindy are likely only in their mid-twenties or so by the end of the film, but physical aging is evident. This is very ordinary story that highlights how mismatched individuals often fall in love and face difficulties down the road. The qualities that attract two people at the beginning are often the very qualities that can tear them apart later on. This film does a wonderful job of showing us snapshots of how this works.

Dean is a good man who considers himself lucky to have a job (house painter) that allows him to drink throughout the day. Cindy is a nurse with unmet ambitions. They attempt to rekindle their romance during a night in a spaceship-themed motel room (seems to be Atlantic City). She asks Dean..."Isn't there something you want to do?" I heard an interview with Williams and Gosling. They spent a month together living in the house on the movie set, where they celebrated together an entire year of special occasions together and got to know each other in order to convey a convincing married couple--they do appear quite natural together.

Gosling has a perpetual teenage boy quality that was featured in an earlier film, Lars and the Real Girl. Williams has a quality of depth from her actual lived life of caring for a young daughter and the loss of the child's father, Heath Ledger. They create a film that is a beautiful, sad, heartfelt story that reflects contemporary life in the most real way. This may not be her year to win an Oscar, but she will one day.