Blue Valentine

Last night Amy and I watched Blue Valentine with Ryan Gosling and MIchelle Williams. WHAT???? we said at the end. What could have possibly gone so awry in this young couple's life together that she is yelling "There's nothing left in here for you." and he's pleading tearfully "What do you want me to do?"

The New Yorker review talks about what a wrenching portrait it is of love, once so fun and innocent and later so... gone. I mean here we have a guy who (spoiler alert) steps up to be a father to a child that is not his, holds a job, refuses to physically fight back when goaded by the wife, takes a beating by the asshole baby daddy and whose only crime seems to be that he doesn't rise to his full potential. Or maybe it's just that she is holding against him the fact that she had to lower her career expectations and now has a regular life--in a nice brick house with a newer SUV and a guy who has some growing up to do. As if all guys don't have some growing up to do. They're GUYS.

I blame it on Hollywood with its on-going misunderstanding of the lives of us regular folks out here in the hinterlands. Well, hell, out there, they just get 'em some new romance when that first blush of excitement rubs off. Here, we are sticking with the ups and downs, well past the five or so years that these two have spent together.

If the movie had given us SOMETHING to explain why she's done with this life: his drinking interfered with him holding a job, she finds someone who gives her new hope, they're living a scrubby existence with no family support. But all WE see is her running into the scumbag baby daddy in a liquor store and being obviously flattered that the gum-chewing neanderthal still finds her attractive.

And the director's trick of cutting back and forth in time, for me, was just that-- a trick. Apparently aimed at making us remember the 10 minutes ago when the couple was in that love/lust period with not a care in the world. I could have taken a little more linear storytelling, something that would explain where, as Amy said, the B was that showed us how they got from point A to point C.

The leads may be up for Oscars for this performance but the award should go to the makeup artist who made the young, fresh-faced couple age over the five-year span of the "plot" into unglamorous, prematurely aged middle Americans.

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