Blue Valentine (2010)

Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine arrived in 2010 with two movie stars, a Super 16mm camera, and a marriage to dismantle. It alternates between the giddy Brooklyn courtship of Dean and Cindy and the sour Pennsylvania aftermath, and it does so without narration, without a thesis, and without any interest in telling us how to feel. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams improvised much of it, and the result has the texture of something found rather than composed. The film was briefly threatened with an NC-17 for a scene of oral sex performed on a woman, a ruling Gosling called sexist and not without reason.

Where the picture carries any social charge, it sits with Cindy. She is a nurse who once studied pre-med. She manages the child, the breakfast, the schedule, the emotional labor, while Dean paints houses, drinks beer behind the wheel, and clings to the notion that loving hard is the same as trying. Her fatigue is rendered with real sympathy, and the film is honest about how a woman's ambitions get quietly absorbed by a man's contentment. It never announces this. It lets the dishes pile up and the offer of a better job go unanswered. Dean is not a villain. He is a man who stopped growing and cannot see it, and the script declines to hand either of them a speech.

The rest of the contemporary checklist goes untouched. Race is not a subject. Class is a detail of wardrobe and budget, not an argument. The nudity is intimate drama, not a statement about bodies. Dean's drinking is a flaw, not a diagnosis. There is no environment to save and no system to indict. The film leaves us with a portrait of two people failing at close range, and it is better for having no sermon in it. The vintage is dry, bitter, and entirely of its own making.