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Blue Valentine: Too Much Blue Makes This Story Nebulous

By Carrie Stemke · August 5, 2014

Sometimes, a movie comes along that people think transcends the screen, and I have no idea why. Blue Valentine is a good example. I watched it because I was interested and it had gotten such great reviews, but what I found was an exhausting story of two people struggling through their miserable marriage.

Director Derek Cianfrance’s romantic drama tells the tale of the once-happy Dean and Cindy, a married couple with a daughter who had reached “that point” in their marriage, when two people realize how unhappy they are with each other. The film goes back and forth between when Dean and Cindy first met and the circumstances that led up to their marriage, and the present, in which their relationship is no longer working. While I think for many people, sadly, this is a very relatable story, I didn’t think its contents withheld the test of captivation onscreen. Not only is the plotline mundane, but there’s not really much of a plotline there. Cianfrance and co. cobbled together bits and pieces of two people’s rather sad lives and stuck them together and tried to make a movie. Even the ending is unsatisfactory – Cianfrance doesn’t seem to know how to wrap everything up.

The characters themselves have little depth or much else to recommend them. They’re nebulous through and through. I’ve liked both Michelle Williams (who plays Cindy) and Ryan Gosling (who plays Dean) in other roles that they’ve been in, but this movie reinforced my opinion that Michelle Williams just wants to win an Oscar and that she’s purposefully choosing roles to achieve that. Ryan Gosling seems to be choosing edgier roles in which he plays an aggressive man who doesn’t say much, and let me just say, Drive was the best of the bunch. Lately, a lot of the movies he’s chosen have been all the same. In Blue Valentine, neither actor moves their character beyond “miserable.” Even in the scenes where they first meet, these people are pretty unhappy. They both lacked the qualities to make me like them as an audience member, or to make me want to root for their marriage to work out or for one or the other to find happiness.

Overall, I can’t support the acclaim that seemed to surround this movie. It wasn’t particularly anything special to me. I do like romantic dramas, but this effort’s hollowed out core brings it down in the bluest of ways.

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