Blue valentine (2010)

Dean is a high-school dropout who makes a living as a painter. Cindy is a nurse with ambitions. They are married, and have a young daughter who was born just after they married. Derek Cianfrance crafts a grown-up drama about the agonies of adulthood - life becoming different than what would have dreamed it to be. Blue valentine is a raw film about people who fall in love and grow apart, who fail to take responsibility and seem to perceive no possibilities of where to go in life. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams play the leading roles and they are both excellent. The way these people grow apart is painful to watch - the words that are intended to hurt, the crushing silences and the sorrowful kid. One day, the daughter's dog goes missing, and the parents accuse one another of it happening. Most of the important stuff that happens is not expressed in dramatic lines; the dramatic thing here is a slow change that is hard to pin down; when did it go wrong?

What sets the film apart from most of the movies in this field - the grown-up, realistic dramas about adult relationships - is its class setting. Where most other movies are set in glossy city centers or leafy suburbia, Blue valentine's couple is working-class, barely getting by, hardly working any flashy dream jobs (they are not lawyers or shrinks). We see Dean slowly drifting into a state of alcoholism, while his wife resents his lack of ambition. She seems to mourn the possibilities that were unfulfilled in her own life, how she ended up with this guy who most of all likes to sit at home. The film uses flashbacks to illustrate how their life together was always full of problems. Flashbacks are mostly OK in this movie, but sometimes I feel they are used indulgently. But like for example Revolutionary Road, this is a serious drama about tensions between people who view life differently and who fail to understand how much they hurt one another. There are a couple of scene that works less well than others, but mostly, the rawness hits hard.