REVIEW By Bridget Spinks
A love that might have been ends hopelessly when God or higher moral principals have no bearing on how two people in Blue Valentine love each other.
What we get is a depressing portrait of a modern relationship. A reresentation of a bleak and brutal reality. When I watched this movie, like them I tried to work out where the relationship had failed; shutting my eyes and blocking my ears in a few places.
Blue Valentine, directed by Derek Cianfrance, was cracked up to offer a “raw and subtly-drawn portrait of the ebb and flow of love”; it promised much and offered little in the way of the transcendent.
On the little promotional card in the foyer, the blurb said that Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) are “parents of a beloved young daughter”. But actually they’re not really. Little six year old Frankie is Cindy’s daughter from a previous and destructive relationship and Dean, whom she marries, is the guy enamoured with her when she discovers she is pregnant.
When they meet, Dean has noble, romantic ideas of love and marries her promising to love her through her best and worst moments. But they’re not on the same page. For him, marriage means commitment for ever and ever, amen. For Cindy, well, we don’t really know what she was thinking it would be. Cindy’s character is but a sad reflection of 21st century reality: a 20-something, discovered by a possible Mr Right in the blossom of her youth who begins and ends the relationship mystified and confused by what love really is. It’s because she has lied with her body, trying to find it too many times.
The movie flashes between the past and present episodes in their lives.
In the present, Dean and Cindy have different approaches to parenthood and we see their parental devotion to six year old Frankie take interesting turns. They both love Frankie in their own way but neglect to share the joy of parenting with one another.
Dean met Cindy when he was moving furniture into an elderly man’s unit. He saw her across the hall, caring for her grandma.
Just prior to this, Cindy had been asking her grandma those perennial questions about when the wise old soul knew she was in love. Everyone wants to know what true love is and when they think they’ve found it, they want to know how they can be sure.
The problem is that it’s so easy to find false love, it’s hard to distinguish the real thing from all the fakes. For Cindy there’ve been 20, maybe 25, fakes. And then she meets Dean.
The plot thickens when Cindy discovers she is pregnant but not to Dean, who thinks he has found the love of his life. He just had a feeling when he met her that he knew her. When Cindy tells Dean the news, he asks her if she knows who the father is (ie is it his baby?) and then he asks her what she’ll do. He seems to assume she has been promiscuous before she met him and worse, that she has a choice as to whether to keep the unexpected baby.
Next thing you know, Cindy is at an abortion clinic (they don’t advertise this on the flier) and is being asked about when she first had sex (at 13) and how many partners she’s had (20, maybe 25).
She squirms through the preparation and almost goes through with it but at the last minute calls out ‘stop’. Dean, who was waiting outside, supports her and hugs her and loves her when she comes out distraught.
What’s the point of all this? Dean married Cindy before she had a chance to say no. He knew there would be no one worthy of her and he wanted the task to look after her. He admits in hindsight that he didn’t seek fatherhood as a life goal but now that he has it, he recognises that and wants simply to enjoy the contentment that comes with family life: being her husband and Frankie’s father. But it seems that Cindy wanted more than this. She had a bright future in medicine before she became pregnant and never had the chance to pursue this.
So she’s caught, six years later, projecting her broken dreams on Dean, asking him whether there was something more he wanted.
You’ve got so much potential, she says. You’re so talented; you can draw, you can sing. He replies that he doesn’t want to make any money from this, he doesn’t have to and he’s content to work so he can enjoy his family time.
While Dean is characterised as the noble one in the relationship, wanting to fight for his family and seek contentment in fatherhood, he’s not perfect either. He drinks before he leaves for work, swears at times uncontrollably and unfortunately can’t reach Cindy on an intellectual level.
The film is a reflection of human imperfection, flaws, weaknesses, brokenness. The filming is raw and up-close, the sounds of the daily grind accentuated. At the climactic crunch time for the relationshipCindy says she has “nothing left” in her heart to give to Dean, but the question is did she ever have anything to give or did she just pick the best option? Back when their relationship began, was she really in love with him?
The flier said that they “fall passionately in love in their early 20s”. Ah, no they didn’t. He did, she didn’t.
If Cindy had gone into the relationship rationally, could she have seen the nobility of his devotion and returned it? If Love is a decision after all, we have a choice as to whether we give it away and to whom. Or was her judging ability always going to be clouded as a consequence to her teenage years of promiscuity.
The ultimate complication in this all-too-human drama is that Cindy can’t distinguish the truth when she finds it, which leads me to think that this film is a portrait of life without God. Love without God. A relationship without God.
How can anyone know the meaning of love when they don’t know Who Love is. Love is a person and that person is Jesus Christ Who humbled Himself for man’s salvation.
He sacrificed His life to open the gates of heaven and eternal happiness. It’s here that we can see that real love is sacrificial and here that we can be inspired in our own lives to love in this way.
When Cindy’s empty, she’s empty because she’s human. She was loved into existence by God, but she doesn’t know who God is. She doesn’t know that she can be filled with His love, and from here she can love Dean at his worst. So she can love Dean to become his best.
Likewise, there’s no healing for their relationship because they meet each other in their brittle humanity, their weakness. That’s all they have when they don’t know God.
To make sense of this, let’s turn to Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who in his trademark combination of philosophy, genius, logic and insight into humanity and divinity, articulates what’s wrong here.
In The World’s First Love: Mary the Mother of God (1952), Sheen explains the correlation between virginity and love, the two mysteries running like an undercurrent throughout this movie: “The virgin-love of Christianity teaches the disillusioned lovers that, instead of trying to make the infinite out of a succession of finite loves, they should take the one finite love they have and, by selflessness and charity, capture the Infinite already hidden within it.”
When the secular world wants to make situations cloudy, the eyes of faith and the light of Christ demystify the problem; when the world demands instant gratification and information, hope facilitates patience and leads one to knowledge and truth; when the world wants all the answers right now, trust allows God in to take control of the situation, Who in His time, not our time provides the solutions to human suffering.
If we see problems the way Cindy and Dean do, we see them with mere mortal eyes accustomed to and confined to temporality and we come to a dead end. If we trust in Him who lives outside of time and who knows all things, we come to understand life, truth and freedom and we find peace when we allow God, who loves us, to take care of us in this vale of tears.