Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) are a married couple with a little girl named Frankie who looks to be about three or four. Cindy works as an ultrasound technician. Dean is a house-painter.
Dean is really good with Frankie, in part because he's still kind of a kid himself, and not in a good way. After agreeing with Frankie that the oatmeal Cindy made her looks disgusting, he plops spoonfuls of it all over the table and suggests that they eat the raisins "like tigers", slurping them up with their mouths. Cindy is forced into the role of "responsible parent", whether she wants to be or not; after all, someone has to be the one to clean up the messes.
Cindy no longer loves Dean, or maybe she just no longer likes him, or maybe both. Dean still loves Cindy but in a really whiny annoying way like a five-year-old. He insists that they spend a night at a "couples" motel, despite Cindy's protestations that she has to work the next morning. They wind up in the "future" room, which has a spinning bed and a spaceship motif. The future apparently features a lot of drinking and a lot of fighting.
The movie cuts back and forth between the present, where the couple's relationship sucks, and about four years earlier when they first met, where everything was great. This means it's about evenly split between fighting scenes and sex scenes, plus one charming ukulele/tap dancing scene which you've already seen if you've seen the preview.
I actually watched the first flashback scene without realizing it was a flashback scene and then was completely confused by the second flashback scene (which I DID realize was a flashback scene), which, without realizing there's already been a flashback, seemed to have major continuity errors. Luckily I was with someone who's able to identify flashback scenes without wavy lines or dates printed on the screen.
Apparently, in the older scenes, Dean has a lot more hair, which was obvious once it was pointed out to me. In the present, he has a major receding hairline and he always wears these stupid aviator transition glasses and he's got this mustache that looks like maybe it's meant to be ironic and he always wears this shirt with a giant eagle on it and he's never without a cigarette. Essentially, he's gone from a good-looking guy to a major dork. Actually, I'm actually not sure if he's supposed to be a dork or a hipster. It's kind of a fine line.
Dean's personality has taken an alcohol-fueled turn for the worse also. Younger Dean was kind and sweet and romantic; current Dean is a sulky, unpleasant, fight-picker. Cindy, who at one point aspired to be a doctor, is disappointed that Dean, a high school dropout with presumably a lot of untapped potential (the ukulele!) hasn't amounted to more. Cindy's disappointment is palpable.
Dean's reaction is volatile. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Many of the present-day scenes are extremely unpleasant to watch. Dean, in particular, is the sort of arguer who gets stuck on a phrase and just keeps saying it over and over. It's the "Are we there yet?" school of arguing. Just keep saying the same thing over and over until the other person sticks their head in the oven. And he prefaces everything he says with "baby". "Baby, stop it. Baby, stop it. Baby, stop it. Baby, stop it. Baby, stop it." He's like an insufferable child.
Cindy, on the other hand, seems so disgusted with Dean that she doesn't even pretend to respect him anymore. She doesn't want to argue. She just wants to be left alone.
The main question is, how did Cindy and Dean go from a happy, lovey-dovey, couple who were so into each other that the film initially got an NC-17 rating, to "Baby, stop it"... "Just leave me alone"? If there were any subtle hairstyle changes indicating the depiction of some intermediate time period, I failed to pick up on them. It's just then and now and nothing in between.
I also question why Cindy would be with such an immature loser like Dean in the first place. He did make one chivalrous knight-in-shining-armor move that apparently won her over, but for crying out loud, the warning signs were there all along. The guy climbs over a bridge railing in order to get Cindy to tell him something; coercion of secrets by threatening suicide should probably be considered a red flag.
Disintegrating marriages are never particularly pleasant movie fodder, but some films of this genre are more difficult to watch than others. I loved the far-superior "Rabbit Hole" but found parts of "Blue Valentine" so annoying as to be virtually unwatchable. The longer it went, the more I found myself channeling my inner Dean: "Can we go yet? Can we go yet? Can we go yet?"
Dean is really good with Frankie, in part because he's still kind of a kid himself, and not in a good way. After agreeing with Frankie that the oatmeal Cindy made her looks disgusting, he plops spoonfuls of it all over the table and suggests that they eat the raisins "like tigers", slurping them up with their mouths. Cindy is forced into the role of "responsible parent", whether she wants to be or not; after all, someone has to be the one to clean up the messes.
Cindy no longer loves Dean, or maybe she just no longer likes him, or maybe both. Dean still loves Cindy but in a really whiny annoying way like a five-year-old. He insists that they spend a night at a "couples" motel, despite Cindy's protestations that she has to work the next morning. They wind up in the "future" room, which has a spinning bed and a spaceship motif. The future apparently features a lot of drinking and a lot of fighting.
The movie cuts back and forth between the present, where the couple's relationship sucks, and about four years earlier when they first met, where everything was great. This means it's about evenly split between fighting scenes and sex scenes, plus one charming ukulele/tap dancing scene which you've already seen if you've seen the preview.
I actually watched the first flashback scene without realizing it was a flashback scene and then was completely confused by the second flashback scene (which I DID realize was a flashback scene), which, without realizing there's already been a flashback, seemed to have major continuity errors. Luckily I was with someone who's able to identify flashback scenes without wavy lines or dates printed on the screen.
Apparently, in the older scenes, Dean has a lot more hair, which was obvious once it was pointed out to me. In the present, he has a major receding hairline and he always wears these stupid aviator transition glasses and he's got this mustache that looks like maybe it's meant to be ironic and he always wears this shirt with a giant eagle on it and he's never without a cigarette. Essentially, he's gone from a good-looking guy to a major dork. Actually, I'm actually not sure if he's supposed to be a dork or a hipster. It's kind of a fine line.
Dean's personality has taken an alcohol-fueled turn for the worse also. Younger Dean was kind and sweet and romantic; current Dean is a sulky, unpleasant, fight-picker. Cindy, who at one point aspired to be a doctor, is disappointed that Dean, a high school dropout with presumably a lot of untapped potential (the ukulele!) hasn't amounted to more. Cindy's disappointment is palpable.
Dean's reaction is volatile. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Many of the present-day scenes are extremely unpleasant to watch. Dean, in particular, is the sort of arguer who gets stuck on a phrase and just keeps saying it over and over. It's the "Are we there yet?" school of arguing. Just keep saying the same thing over and over until the other person sticks their head in the oven. And he prefaces everything he says with "baby". "Baby, stop it. Baby, stop it. Baby, stop it. Baby, stop it. Baby, stop it." He's like an insufferable child.
Cindy, on the other hand, seems so disgusted with Dean that she doesn't even pretend to respect him anymore. She doesn't want to argue. She just wants to be left alone.
The main question is, how did Cindy and Dean go from a happy, lovey-dovey, couple who were so into each other that the film initially got an NC-17 rating, to "Baby, stop it"... "Just leave me alone"? If there were any subtle hairstyle changes indicating the depiction of some intermediate time period, I failed to pick up on them. It's just then and now and nothing in between.
I also question why Cindy would be with such an immature loser like Dean in the first place. He did make one chivalrous knight-in-shining-armor move that apparently won her over, but for crying out loud, the warning signs were there all along. The guy climbs over a bridge railing in order to get Cindy to tell him something; coercion of secrets by threatening suicide should probably be considered a red flag.
Disintegrating marriages are never particularly pleasant movie fodder, but some films of this genre are more difficult to watch than others. I loved the far-superior "Rabbit Hole" but found parts of "Blue Valentine" so annoying as to be virtually unwatchable. The longer it went, the more I found myself channeling my inner Dean: "Can we go yet? Can we go yet? Can we go yet?"