"Blue Valentine": Time is the Villain

Blue Valentine is the most dangerous film of 2010, which is why you probably won't see it on Oscar night.

We can tolerate massive explosions, endless mutilations, shootings at point blank, and all manner of mayhem on the screen, but to watch the normal wear and tear of living drive two people so far apart is just too painful, and too real.

This film is about layers of history, and ultimately about the primacy of the first layer, the family or lack of a family in which we grow up.   That a man and woman have their own romantic history, their own beginning, just seems to matter so much less than the history that shaped or deformed them.

This formative layer is the director of the story.   We have vivid glimpses of the Michelle Williams' character's home life.  Her father is a negative force.  The inability to relate is passed down like a genetic trait.  At a potentially intimate moment, she craves reinforcement of the pain she feels inside, rather than any kind of new awakening.

Ryan Gosling is so effective in his role that for a time you are unsure that the younger and the older man he plays is the same person (it's tragic that not that many years have passed).  To escape the abandonment of his past, his character settles, and by so doing courts his own abandonment.

In the midst of it all, their young daughter embodies joy.  We hope that it carries her through.

It's rare that the male character in a crumbling relationship is the more sympathetic partner.  There is a question he asks about love at first sight.  "Sure," he suggests, "guys may go out with lots of girls, but once they're struck by one - isn't that love?"

Sure, he makes a lot of bad choices, and in a sense, he has not grown up.  He needs a personal trainer and a personal shopper, but these are all externals.  

Every movie, and all of literature, for that matter, seems like one cautionary tale after another.  If a marriage solves problems that are more immediate for one partner than the other that seems to mean trouble.   In the end, solving short-term problems will be forgotten, and the long-term ones will have their day.