Pages Menu
TwitterRssFacebook
Categories Menu

Posted by on Jul 26, 2013 in Featured, Movies | 0 comments

Retrospective Review: So Blue it’s Purple

large_blue_valentine_blu-ray_8

There’s a really great essay by Alan Dershowitz (of all people) called “Life is Not a Dramatic Narrative,” in which he argues that books, films, and television have sold us, collectively, on the idea that the world has a tidy narrative structure. He quotes Chekhov’s thing about narrative cues: “If there’s a gun on the wall in the first act of the play, it must be dislodged by act three.” Effectively, in storytelling, there are no coincidences. If the phone rings, it’s for important news. If someone sneezes, they’re going to die. A happens, which leads to B, which leads to C. It doesn’t (can’t) get more complicated than that—films are only two hours long, after all. However, he argues, the film-going public has been fed these narratives so consistently that we now believe that life, not just art, is structured neatly, has a cause-effect, isn’t random, and totally coheres. “Everything happens for a reason,” you’ll hear people constantly repeat, when the real truth is that nothing does.

Dershowitz’s point was about the way juries absorb the facts of a trial, but I think it can apply just as easily to contemporary films—especially films about love. Movies and love are actually a ridiculous match when you think about it, so ridiculous that it’s a wonder any films get made about love at all. Film is a structured, formulaic Aà B à C narrative medium, shaped and contained to fit within a two-hour timeframe, conceived by the minds of professionals. Love is messy, hectic, unpredictable business, conceived by the hearts of rank amateurs. This is probably why we don’t see any films that accurately portray contemporary relationships.

In contemporary directors’ defenses, however, they do try. Closer, All the Real Girls, Like Crazy, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have given it a shot (“the most accurate film yet about contemporary relationships,” I wrote re: Eternal Sunshine a few months ago). Still, though—those films all have premises, at least premises beyond Let’s-watch-these-people-date. Blue Valentine (2010) decidedly does not have a premise beyond that, which is why I admired it. It’s also why it’s so ultimately disappointing.

You want the premise? Here it is: Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) meet, fall in love, get married, and fall out of love. That’s it: no cheating, no moving away, no (physical) abuse, no obvious scapegoat for their downfall. They’re just in love one day and the next they’re not, which is awesome (and bold, cinematically speaking), since of course that’s what happens in real life—we don’t have easy explanations for our feelings, nor for their absence. Neither do Dean and Cindy.

That may sound boring, but it’s not. Writer/director Derek Cianfrance keeps it lively by contrasting the first blush of love with the waning latter days of marriage, so that every other scene (now the former, now the latter) shows them at the beginning or the end. A scene totally demonstrative of this style comes when the couple (early in their courtship) shows off their talents to each other. He plays the ukulele while she tap-dances, romantically lit in front of a papier-mâché heart. It’s a sweet moment for the two of them (they’re falling for each other in front of our eyes), but the song he’s singing is “You Always Hurt the One You Love,” the ominous lyrics of which they totally ignore.

The contrast between the pessimistic lyrics over the optimistic scene is a microcosm of everything else the film does (even the title is oxymoronic). You could make the argument (as a very smart friend of mine has) that this technique is actually just crude and manipulative, since any relationship looks like it’s gone sour when juxtaposed with what it looked like at the start. After all, if I show you a black card, then a white card, then a black card again then a white card again, that’s not the same thing as showing you a grey card. It may look like a grey card if I do it really fast, but it’s not the same. But I’m willing to forgive Cianfrance this (possible) misstep because the young-Dean-and-Cindy scenes are not merely whimsical but specific to them. His ass-kicking and her attempted abortion are brutal to watch. And special props for using Gosling and Williams in the central roles—what’s more symbolic of poorly-constructed, simplistic sentimentality than Dawson’s Creek and The Notebook? (Cianfrance even has Gosling recreate the scene from The Notebook where he says he’ll kill himself to get the girl to talk—uh…not that I’ve seen The Notebook…).

Dean and Cindy search for why they’re u happy, and as they grasp at straws, so does the film.  It suggests that maybe their parents are to blame (Dean’s mom abandoned the family; Cindy’s dad is abusive). But that answer’s too easy and the film knows it: Dean emulates his dad while Cindy runs from her own family, so who’s right? Maybe the problem is the battle of the sexes—perhaps men and women are just too different. “I feel like men are more romantic than women. When we get married we marry, like, one girl, ’cause we’re resistant the whole way until we meet one girl and we think I’d be an idiot if I didn’t marry this girl she’s so great. But it seems like girls get to a place where they just kinda pick the best option… ‘Oh he’s got a good job.’ I mean they spend their whole life looking for Prince Charming and then they marry the guy who’s got a good job and is gonna stick around,” Dean says in a bullshit session with his (all-male) co-workers. Maybe the problem is just that their personalities clash: he’s an open-book fool-for-love, she’s a closet romantic, closed-off and skeptical. None of these answers prove totally true (though they all prove a little true), and that’s the ballsiest thing about the film: it allows the characters to not have any idea why they don’t love each other anymore.

Sadly, the film loses its nerve, big time, in the third act. Cianfrance—perhaps fearful that the audience wouldn’t like Cindy for falling so baselessly out of love with Dean, or maybe just fearful of an audience raised on Chechovian dramatic structure craving answers—dumbs the whole thing down in the end. Dean, out of absolutely nowhere, turns from a loving husband, laid-back guy, and stellar father into a drunken monster. He trashes Cindy’s work, punches her boss in the face, and drives drunk, the first time he’s displayed any of this behavior. When Cindy shouts, “This is why I don’t talk to you! I’ve had it up to here with this!” the only possible audience response is, Excuse me?

It’s dishonest, is what I’m saying, a classic bait-and-switch, luring us in with the promise of something truly, daringly (finally!) complicated, then ultimately settling for an easy excuse, pointing its finger at a (suddenly) deadbeat dad. It begins as something potentially intelligent, and ends as a think piece for stupid people. Maybe Chekhov was right, and there really is no way to tell a story without a simplistic narrative. Still, I’d rather see a film not try at all than come so close only to miss the mark so widely.

6/10

Comments

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this: