Blue Valentine

A beautiful and I guess, painful movie.......a complex portrayal, or maybe portrayal of a complex, once beautiful and now crumbling marriage.

It's tender, raw.....sad and real. A story of how two people can fall in love and for reasons known and unknown fall out of love. Sad when the falling out happens to one and not the other. That's where it gets raw and real.

Cindy ( Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) meet, fall in love, get married, have a child......and slowly the differences in their personalities, their approach, their ways start to grow. As I read somewhere, he got into marriage as a station, and she got in for the train. 

The movie runs through six years of a marriage, and flits back and forth between the difficult present and the beautiful beginning. The director Derek Cianfrance, has gone so subtle and deep that he sucks you into their lives and creates almost an uncomfortable proximity. 

Her journey starts to show the cracks and there's no one big reason, which is why it can get under your skin. The very same qualities which appealed to her, the romantic, the dreamer, the winsome guy slowly start to get intolerable as she sees the other side of the very same traits.

It raises some deep and relevant questions. How do relationships fail? how is it that at one point in love everything about the other is beautiful, and then it turns sour? Is it possible to pause and change course, or are there times when certain relationships just contain seeds of the end? How many relationships continue on contrived ecosystems? Most difficult, does one just stay and work at it, in the process prolonging pain and disconnect? 

Cindy ( Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) were brilliant ...... when young and full of tenderness, energy and love...... and then the present, where even her smile is forced and takes effort.

The realization, the acknowledgement, the sadness to let go something that was once beautiful, and the courage it takes to do so. Michelle Williams I thought was outstanding, as it's she who's on the journey, and he can but stand and watch.

A definitely worthwhile watch.