Back in March, Tim Adkins took a poignant look at the unplanned pregnancy crux of Blue Valentine and transitioned the filmic conflict into a personal one, exploring the ways in which one deals with similar crises. He is not alone. The fork in the relationship road has been stumbled upon by many whether the roads taken and untaken navigate through parenthood, abortion, marriage, bachelorhood, cohabitating, perseverance, or divorce. By creating a broad emotional appeal, the film easily draws an audience into Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy’s (Michelle Williams) fractured, precarious, and, often, uncomfortable existence.
At the same time, Blue Valentine masks itself as the clever telling of a devolving love story. Ostensibly, it is such. As the movie begins, young Frankie (Faith Wladkya) stands alone in a pasture, calling for Megan, the family’s golden retriever. The unrequited response and the futility with which she beckons cast a pall upon the forthcoming family dynamic, mirroring the isolation and distance found therein. The beginning of the film bespeaks the end of the relationship, and the tension created within the first five minutes is tantamount only to the final two minutes. The first problem exhibited is Dean’s role as a perpetual child who encourages Frankie to pick the raisins out of her tasteless oatmeal that Cindy prepared and eat them off of the table like a grazing lamb. While the scene is touching because it relates an earnest love between Dean and Frankie, it first illustrates the rift between parenting styles as well as the disparate senses of responsibility, something that clearly angers Cindy more because she’s charged with preparing breakfast and getting both herself and Frankie ready for work. This is not to say that Dean is unemployed. (The film, refreshingly, doesn’t stoop low enough to vilify either character.) Rather, Dean wakes early to paint houses, shortly after an “8:00 am beer,” something he refers to as “the dream.”
More so than just the crumbling marriage, Blue Valentine focuses on the chasm augured by this dream. But, it’s not a morality tale that speaks to the dangers of alcohol or childish behavior. Instead, it looks at choices, goals, defining moments, and the subsequent trajectories they chart.
In Blue Valentine fashion, let’s jump back an x-amount of time to discuss the younger versions of Dean and Cindy. (Segue: the transitions between the past and present in Blue Valentine are doubly effective in that the audience is not given a specific time frame like 6 months ago, or any specific dates. We can guess most of the flashbacks happen between 7 and 9 years from whence we began, and, more importantly to the artistry of the film, the lack of framing serves to define our characters, but that can be tackled a bit later.)
As we meet Dean, he is in his early twenties and interviewing for a job with a Queens-based moving company. His admission that he has no formal job experience makes the viewer question how he has survived for a decade or two in New York, but this facet of his life is not interrogated. Instead, the film jumps to Dean moving boxes up and down stairs and then quickly onto a new assignment that casts him and two other movers as sentimental relocaters who have been hired to move Marshall, a septum – or octo — genarian former veteran, from New York City into a Pennsylvania convalescent home. While Dean’s counterparts load and unload rapidly to beat traffic, Dean takes the time to adorn the senior’s wall with his matchbook collection and hang his officer’s uniform in plain view for everyone to see. Here, Dean’s past is elided and replaced with generosity, sweetness, and sentimentality. Most importantly, we see that Dean is not aiming much higher. There’s no judgment here by me or the film, but Dean exists as is, content with doing “little things” for people and surviving on the unsteady cash flow he earns by moving people from one place to another – or one station to another is we want to get a bit more meta.
In contrast, we meet Cindy, whose grandmother resides across the hall from Marshall in the same convalescent home. Initially wary of Dean, Cindy begins to find him more attractive when he ends up (in a rather stalkerly, yet somewhat cute fashion) on the same bus she takes home. Their night progresses and a genuine interest in the other is developed; however, it’s unclear where the interest comes from. Dean seems smitten by Cindy’s beauty while Cindy seems more intrigued by the fact that Dean is not Bobby (Mike Vogel), her boyfriend. Blue Valentine, in all its cleverness, does little to mask the polar differences of Dean and Cindy. Whereas Dean is a drifting twenty-something content with existing, Cindy is a college student, dates a star on the wrestling team, and is determined to “work in medicine” and become “a doctor,” something repeated throughout the movie. In a sense, Cindy’s initial interest seems less kismet and more a venture into slumming that distracts her from Bobby’s assholishness.
The issue that arises, as Tim mentioned before, is Cindy’s unplanned impregnation by Bobby, not Dean. Cindy is not cast as the evil tramp here; rather, there is a heart-rending, emotion confrontation between her and Dean in which she answers his “is it mine?” with an earnest “probably not.” He doesn’t convince her to take a course of action, and her mind has already been set on terminating the pregnancy because Bobby is too self-centered to be a father. However, when Cindy changes her mind on the examination table and asks the doctor to stop the procedure, Dean is there to convince her that they can raise this child together as a family. Essentially, he becomes her knight in shining armor, they marry, and the idyllic fairy tale is set.
The problem is our awareness of the present Dean and Cindy, who are distant, disjointed, and equally miserable. The reason is not the marriage; it’s not the birth of Frankie (both parents cherish her), so Blue Valentine doesn’t seem to be championing the upside of abortion. Rather, their present is impacted by what they respectively tout as their defining moments. For Dean, a perpetual adolescent who innocently exists without an agenda but with a desire to help people and make them comfortable, supporting and marrying Cindy so they can raise Frankie together is his defining moment. And while raising another man’s child with the woman you love can be seen in some light as noble, this act of altruism allows Dean to be fulfilled. Each day, he gets to be a father and love his daughter. In a sense, his past aspirations and his present do not vary. Rather, they’ve been fulfilled, so there’s little incentive to strive for anything else. The problem with this scenario within the film is that Dean wears his action like a crown and seems to be content flaunting this moment eternally while not moving beyond it – the most obvious representations of this are the tattoo of a heart on his arm (sleeve) and of a scene from The Giving Tree on his shoulder. (The metaphors are a bit heavy handed, but they suggest he is perpetually living in the past and showcasing it to Cindy every day.)
On the other hand, Cindy’s life was full of “potential” and chartered toward medical school until the pregnancy caused a tangent in this path and steered her toward the same plateau on which Dean resides. There’s no judgment here on either party, but Cindy has moved past the grand gesture and wants to keep striving for her aspirations. Therfore, the issue is less the birth of Frankie and more the symbolic mooring to an undesirable spouse.
Aside from a few heavy-handed metaphors, Blue Valentine relays the ditty between Dean and Cindy, mostly, through visuals rather than pure exposition. As noted before, the transitions between the past and present are most prevalent in the characterization of each character. In each flash, we catch a glimpse of each character, but the marked difference is how they – but mostly Cindy – react to the situation. The whimsical flirtation between the two is tender and cloying in the past as both of them blush with mile-long grins. In the present, Dean tries to revive these moments, but his agency is met with resistance, and he can’t adapt to remedy the situation. In other words, Cindy’s present emotions and desires go unrecognized because Dean’s present and past desires are one in the same. This is abundantly clear when the flashbacks and forwards center on their sexual encounters, moving from elated to uncomfortable, pleasure to pain, and passion to indifference. Unfortunately, Dean and Cindy are on the same page for the former, but we and Cindy are on the same page for the latter.
In the end, Blue Valentine is the antithesis of a love story. Rather, it’s a look at what we take from our choices. Do we let them define us? Do we let them stunt us? Can we build on them, or are they our final curtain?
