Published: Tuesday, July 19th, 2011 @ 6:02 pm
By: Wyatt Sanderman Day   ( More Entries )
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Truly a Blue Valentine

    I mostly love "Indie Films." As a film aficionado, I get to root for the underdog production and enjoy the tale told well in celluloid all at the same time. It makes for a good evening and a good review for the first-run film or DVD. A positive experience all around.

    Blue Valentine was not that "Indie Film." This recently released DVD will not get a good review from this reviewer this go round.

    Why?

    The short of it: It just was not very good. The story had no depth. The script was quite poor - as if the actors, in some scenes, were making it up as they went along, because of lack of any credible dialogue, or sadly, that was the dialogue. Director Derek Cianfrance helped with Cami Delavigne's and Joey Curtis's screenplay, and it was an abysmal concoction.

    The actors were committed to their roles. I easily saw that. They just were not so committed to the dialogue, or maybe the reverse was true. In one particular scene, when Ryan Gosling, as the affable furniture-mover-turned-house-painter Dean, was deep in the pathos of that character's ego, he seemed distracted as if he was looking for direction, or just reading from Q-cards. I'd put my money on the Q-cards as if the scene was rewritten, and then hastily shot to stay within budget, with the actor's lines written to keep him on message.

    Regardless of the why-for, the scene did not work, and this was not the only scene that did not work. And this is unforgivable if the film is to work. The characters must be believable and to be believable the actors must become a version of someone with whom the audience can identify with. I could not identify with Actor Gosling's Dean. The females watching this little movie with me, likewise, could, not identify with Michelle Williams' Cindy: Dean's wife and the mother of his child.

    These two were so pitiful, but truly, only Dean was pitiable. He was certainly not perfect, but he cherished his family, loved them the best he could. Cindy wanted more from life: She wanted more from her husband, she wanted more from her existence and how she is sustained to that existing life that she could not quite understand. It led to her total and irrevocable dissatisfaction with whom she had become, and there was just no fixing it.

    Ryan Gosling's Dean would have done all he could do to remedy the situation, begging through his tears in the one pitiable scene deserving of our empathy: "Tell me how I should be. Just tell me. I'll do it."

    Dean could not fix his family. Director Derek Cianfrance could not fix this "Indie Film" in its 112 minutes of runtime. After seeing the film, and well considering it, I am sorry for Dean, but moreover, I am sorry for that 112 minutes I will never get back.

    Rated R. Released on DVD May 10 , 2011.

    This article provided courtesy of our sister site: Better Angels Now