BLUE VALENTINE

Even true, sweet love doesn't always have a happy ending.

Alternating present day misery with flashbacks of sweet young love, Blue Valentine is so realistic in its portrayal of an unexceptionally normal couple that you may as well be watching the break-up of some friends—or be reflecting on a doomed relationship from your own past. There are no shoot-outs or outrageous climaxes, there is just a crumbling of the love between two people that, despite their love, aren't the best match.

Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) meet cute. He is a sort of romantic idealist that can fall in love with a stranger after a fleeting crossing of paths. The girl he sets his sights on is Cindy, whom he meets at a nursing home. Immediately this establishes that they are both inherently good people, as she is visiting her grandmother that she adores, and he is a moving man that is kindly setting up the new (brief) home of an elderly man who has just been shuttled to the home by his absent family. Dean gives Cindy his card. She doesn't call. With some sleuthing helped by a dash of coincidence he finds her again.

As the film flips between past and present, you see Dean and Cindy with a young daughter, sharing a home, stuck in the daily rut of everyday life. She works as a nurse, and he has slipped into his latest easy job, as a house painter (where one of the benefits is being able to drink a beer at 8:30 in the morning). She feels like she is raising two children, and thinks any potential he had has been wasted. He thinks his wife looks down on him, and perhaps doesn't love him anymore. He is jealous, she is distant. He tries to spark up their relationship for a weekend away, renting an awful futuristic-themed room at a love hotel. They fight. They drink. They attempt angry sex. They pass out. In the meantime, we keep getting flashback scenes of what their relationship used to be.

Blue Valentine is effective because it is completely realistic. There really is no bad guy in this relationship, and you can see that if they could just pull it together and meet halfway, that their marriage might be worth saving. The couple's young-love moment, where, on the street, she dances an impromptu soft-shoe to his warbling ukelele rendition of "You Always Hurt the One You Love" is pretty adorable. Plus I dare you to find a more tender moment as when Dean cradles Cindy on a public bus after she has made a life-changing decision that will shape the rest of their relationship. This makes the stinging words in the hotel room that much more harsh. Cruel words can cause as much irreparable harm as physical violence, and, at that point, you know that for these two there just might be no going back.