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Giving you something to read on the toilet since 2009.

"The mistake lies in seeing debate and discussion as secondary to the recovery of meaning. Rather, we should see them as primary: art and literature do not exist to be understood or appreciated, but to be discussed and argued over, to function as a focus for social dialogue. The discourse of literary or art criticism is not to recover meaning, but to create and contest it. Our primal scene should not be the solitary figure in the dark of the cinema but the group of friends arguing afterwards in the pub."
-Don Fowler (1996) "Even Better Than The Real Thing"

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Blue Valentine - James King


Not a date movie.


There were few milestones on the road to Dean and Cindy’s breakup, only a long stretch of bumpy road wearing their relationship to broken down. This movie is mercilessly honest (no’you had me at hellos’ or ‘I love you Shopgirls’) ; and to understand the wreck of their relationship, or any relationship for that matter, your only evidence lies in the accumulation of small parts.

Where other movies explain the death of a relationship through the affair or the violent confrontation, Blue Valentine shows it in the countless little arguments, the weary looks, the palpable, unsaid, mutual disappointment. They both had expected so much more. What went wrong? Can they make it alright again?


In answer to these difficult, maybe unanswerable questions, the film exhibits the relationship at face value—the early, good moments inter cut with the later, painful moments, cohering into a whole, walking, talking relationship. But we know, as the characters themselves know, that this thing is doomed. The fact that neither of them can walk away until their relationship is dragged out to the last agonizing detail, is a testament to the thrill and poetry of their initial love.


Juxtaposing those early, beautiful moments (to some NC-17 beautiful) with the later gut-wrenchers creates the sense of watching two sets of Cindy and Deans—same people, at oppositional points in their lives, occupying the same space. Kind of like watching somebody get a root canal and a puppy at the same time.


Gossling in particular is all future and charm and poetic gazes into the New York distance as a young man and all angry and sad and sunken behind dark-tinted glasses as an older, young man. What makes this movie great is that there are shades of dark in the early character (charming aimlessness) and specks of light in the later character (any scene with his daughter).


It makes one wonder, in that climactic gut-wrenchingest of gut-wrenching scenes, whether the best and worst moments of a life don’t linger at the poles but rather circle and commingle, each bearing witness to the other.


Not a date movie. But a great movie, movie.

2 comments:

  1. I read an interview with Gosling in which he said Blue Valentine is the best movie he will ever make. I'll definitely see this.

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  2. After seeing this I think your review is right on.

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