Film review: Blue Valentine

Writer/director Derek Cianfrance's first idea was to shoot this film in two parts.

He sent scripts to Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling nine years ago, with a plan to complete the second part of the film after a seven or eight-year interval. And that would have been a startling achievement.

But the money didn't come through, and maybe the actors couldn't commit themselves at the same time, and so Blue Valentine was made the conventional way, with the genius of a film crew's wardrobe, hair, and make-up departments left to convincingly take Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling from one end of an eight-year relationship to the other.

And that is all that Blue Valentine is; either end of a relationship.

We meet our couple as they are on the very quivering cusp of getting together. He is a house mover, she is training to be a nurse. Eight years later, he is a house painter, she is a full-time nurse. Together they have raised a daughter.

Everything in between these few days at the end, and these few weeks at the beginning, is for us to intuit. It's a great testimony to Cianfrance's writing and to the skill of the two leads that we can make all the leaps we need to.

Williams and Gosling are breathtaking. They inhabit these characters more than play them. Every word, gesture, and glance is pitch perfect, communicating everything that needs to be said, and carrying with it an echo of every moment that has gone before.

Blue Valentine is of necessity a sad film, but it is also an enormously watchable and compassionate one. I liked it more than pretty much anything else I've seen this year. Go see it.

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