Blue Valentine

Rated R [on appeal for strong graphic sexual content, language, and a scene of violence.]
Running Time: 112 min.
Release Date: December 29, 2010


CAST
Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine is beautiful and raw, in a way that feels more like a home video than a movie. It stars Ryan Gosling as Dean Periera, a high school drop-out who lives paycheck to paycheck working for a moving company. Alongside Gosling, is Michelle Williams, who plays his wife, Cynthia “Cindy” Heller. She is a pre-med student who lives with her parents and takes care of her grandmother. What's great about Williams and Gosling's chemistry is that it's real. For the scenes in the past when they meet each other for the first time, they are in fact, meeting each other for the first time. Cianfrance let them both walk and talk all night getting acquainted with each other with a camera following them, so the connection we see between the two is real. The dialogue between them for most of the movie is improvisation. For preparation for the scenes that took place in the present, Williams and Gosling were provided a little house to stay in for a month and live like a real couple.

PLOT SUMMARY
Blue Valentine is a movie within a movie. The film starts with the present where Dean and Cindy's marriage is starting to fall apart. Inter-weaved in the present, are scenes from their past where they meet for the first time and fall in love right away. In the past, as Cindy begins to fall in love with Dean, she becomes pregnant from her ex-boyfriend. Dean accepts to raise the baby as his own and so him and Cindy get married. Switch to the present, and we have Dean and Cindy married with their daughter Frankie. Their marriage is rapidly falling apart and the spark that was between the two at the beginning seems to have faded out.

DIRECTOR
Blue Valentine is director Derek Cianfrance's second film. His first film, Brother Tied (1998) was a success with many film festivals, despite not being well known. Cianfrance has had the story for Blue Valentine ready for many years, but due to budget restraints, he had to wait to go ahead with production.

SOUNDTRACK
Folk-rock band “Grizzly Bear” are the composers for Blue Valentine. For the songs Dean plays in the film, actor Ryan Gosling, actually sang as well as played the ukelele. Lakeshore Records released the soundtrack for the film.

CINEMATOGRAPHY & WRITING
Andrij Parekl is the cinematographer for the film. The film is shot like a home movie, with the camera hidden at times and shaky. There are many close-up and extreme close-up shots for the added effect of really seeing how the character is feeling. The writing for Blue Valentine is very real, director Derek Cianfrance along with Camie Delavigne, and Joey Curtis are the reason for that. However, Ciancfrance stated that he was afraid that because he had the script for so long, that the actors would be too familiar with it. Therefore, he told Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams to use the script as something to fall back on, and to improvise more-so instead.

CONCLUSION
I think Blue Valentine deserves a 4.5 out of 5 penguins. It is just one of those films that did so much right that there is little to no room for wrong. The acting is remarkable, as expected by both actors. The writing is perfect, and doesn't seem fake because it's not and it captures the essence of relationship problems dead on. The music also fits well and helps to make for more fluidity in the film. There is quite a bit of nudity and language, so this is definitely not a film for kids.

-sNix