GRADE: A

Director: Derek Cianfrance

Starring: Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams, Mike Vogel, John Doman, Faith Wladyka

Rated R on appeal for strong graphic sexual content, language, and a beating.

Running Time: 114 minutes

“Blue Valentine” is an agonizing film, a raw, soul-shattering dissection of a marriage’s end. This is not a film for incurable romantics whose perceptions of love are informed by romantic comedies. This is a profoundly honest and realistic testament to the intensity of love’s first blush and its equally passionate end. Deeply uncomfortable and yet terrifyingly relatable, “Blue Valentine” is one of the most authentic representations of marriage I’ve ever seen. And despite all of that, or perhaps because of it, it is also one of the most glorious love stories I’ve ever seen, brought to life by two actors who will shred your heart with their fearless, genuine performances.

Although “Blue Valentine” slides back and forth in time to show who Cindy and Dean (Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling) were before they were a “they,” the film takes place primarily over the course of roughly 24 hours as the couple makes one last try to salvage their smashed marriage. Dean just wants to get drunk and make love. It’s not that he wants to avoid the truth—he is simply desperate for as intimate a human connection with his wife as can be made. For her part, Cindy is past that, incapable of reciprocating even the basest of desires. They try—fumbling and messily—to resuscitate their affection for each other, but in the end they are their own worst enemies.

Why did their bliss atrophy and eventually putrefy? We are not shown. We see only their beginning and their end. But we have no reason to believe it was anything spectacular or unusual, nothing more than the typical barrage of life, job stress, the distraction of children (here played by magnificent newcomer Faith Wladyka), wrestling with shattered dreams and misplaced potential, etc. “How do you trust feelings when they can disappear on you?” Cindy asks, a question that resonates in our own chests. As the film flits between tragedy and euphoria, we realize there is more than enough guilt to go around. Hurt people, as the trite but true turn of phrase goes, hurt people, especially those they love.

Williams and Gosling inhabit their roles like few actors this year, turning in blistering performances stripped bare of any pretention, glamour or ego. All that remains is, by turns, naked ecstasy and anguish. Their first days together are liquid sunlight while their last are gangrenous hoarfrost. The frequent sex in between, simultaneously boorish and unblemished, is a physical barometer by which we monitor the decline.

There are two types of well-written films—those that can’t help but call attention to their brilliance because the dialogue is clearly unrealistic given the fact that when every character opens his or her mouth, poetry spills out (Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Network” springs to mind), and the antithetical to that—the script that feels completely organic, improvised speech so realistic that you almost don’t realize until after the film is through that it too possessed a different yet equally powerful prose. “Blue Valentine” is the latter. Writer/director Derek Cianfrance buries his language deep inside an almost guerilla documentary esthetic, adding yet one more layer of realism that we can’t shake loose.

Photo by