As Tolstoy famously began Anna Karenina, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Director Derek Cianfrance's drama Blue Valentine probes the death throes of a marriage that's become so singularly and uniquely unhappy that it will unsettle viewers with its frankness.
The film jumps back and forth in time during the relationship of Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams), who meet, fall in love, sacrifice for each other, and eventually become toxic for and to each other. A large chunk of the film's action takes place in "The Future Room," an outer-space-themed hotel room the two visit -- at Dean's insistence -- in the hopes of rekindling their dying love with the help of copious amounts of booze, and privacy from their elementary-school-age daughter. This trip is intercut with moments from earlier in their lives -- like when they first met at the retirement home where Cindy's grandmother lived, and when Dean's goofy impulses were amusing to Cindy. As their date night comes to a close, the duo returns to regular life and eventually accepts some hard truths.
Movies about crumbling marriages offer actors more chances to show off the range of their talents than almost any other kind of story, and that certainly holds true for Blue Valentine. Fortunately, Cianfrance casted a pair of gifted young performers as his leads. Williams and Gosling are superb here, and if forced to give one an edge over the other, it's Williams by the slimmest of margins. This comes down to the fact that Cindy has a more complex backstory; we see how bad the relationship she was in just before meeting Dean was, and gain a clear understanding of the emotional issues that keep her unsettled. Williams makes sure Cindy's sadness remains at the forefront of the character's outlook on life -- her happiness during the early times with Dean is a brief moment she doesn't know how to sustain.
For his part, Gosling possesses a particular kind of fearlessness that's welcome in any actor, and particularly rare for one his age -- he's absolutely uninterested in being sympathetic. When we learn the dark secret at the center of Cindy and Dean's marriage -- the fact that not only allowed them to stay together, but arguably doomed them -- our opinion of his character shifts dramatically. Everything about Dean that both we and Cindy found annoying suddenly appears in a different light; his occasionally callous immaturity is a direct response to the pain he feels at her inability to return his innate selflessness.
If it were structured a little tighter, Blue Valentine would hit with the force of Greek tragedy, but Cianfrance strives for a more loose, John Cassavetes-inspired feeling with each of the scenes that makes every conversation an unadorned exploration of often painful feelings -- he's not as interested in building tension as he is in getting the truth of every moment. In lesser hands, that approach would turn this material into little more than an acting exercise -- and there are moments where the film does indulge the actors a little too long. But these are minor quibbles, as Cianfrance's script, his direction, and his flawless casting make Dean and Cindy remarkably specific people. He drills so deep into their emotional cores that anybody who has ever been in a long-term relationship -- successful or not -- will recognize aspects of themselves in these two star-crossed lovers.