A review of Blue Valentine by S. Linwick
Written by Derek Cianfrance, Cami Delavigne, and Joey Curtis
Starring Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling
Score: ☆☆☆☆☆
To read an explanation of our scoring methods, please follow the link below:
From my perspective, Blue Valentine’s most impressive feat is its searching examination of conventional gender roles. The film’s opening scenes left me filled with skepticism about its ability to stage a story I hadn’t seen one thousand plus times before: a bitter wife and mother grows increasingly distant from her doting husband and child until she decides that she must detach from them in order to “find herself.” Such stories inevitably portray wives and mothers in a negative light while depicting husbands and fathers as modern heroes. (Why do men always get to play the heroes?) To the extent that these stories seem to encourage men to embody the role of a caretaker, I do not object to them. Nevertheless, they simultaneously suggest that a child really only has one caretaker. I’d very much like to see a film in which two parents decide that they will share the duties of childcare equitably, and consequently, their relationships with each other and the rest of their family improve. While Blue Valentine does not tell such a story, it does evince a commitment to revising that same old story to which I object.
In a flashback halfway through Blue Valentine, Dean rehashes that hackneyed tale yet again as he reveals that his mother left him and his father to pursue a relationship with someone else. After Cindy’s mother, Glenda, asks him why he doesn’t know what his mother does for a living, he explains, “When I was, whatever, 10, my father and her just decided that it wasn’t gonna work out between them, and she met somebody, and I think…that was that.” At this moment in the flashback, Glenda finds herself at a loss for words. Perhaps her silence indicates that the thought of leaving her own terribly unhappy and abusive marriage never occurred to her. In another flashback earlier in the film, when her husband—Cindy’s father—throws a violent tantrum because he doesn’t like the meal that she has cooked, she can only cringe and reply, “I’m sorry. Do you want me to make you some eggs?” So Cindy’s mother, too, finds herself acting out a fairly clichéd part: the passive and abused wife.
Both Cindy and Dean are haunted by the specter of their parents’ marriages, and both are consumed with the struggle not to be like their parents from the very beginning of the film. Cindy, for instance, confides in her grandmother, “I don’t ever want to be like my parents. I know that they must have loved each other at one time, right? Did they just get it all out of the way before they had me?” Especially given her parents’ own quarrels over the table, Cindy’s agitation when Dean criticizes the instant-oatmeal breakfast she makes for their daughter, Frankie, is more than understandable; she does not want to passively or apologetically endure Dean’s disparagement and thereby replay the role she watched her mother play.
And Dean’s overwhelming fear that Cindy will disappear from his life like his mother disappeared from his and his father’s life is evident from his first exchanges with Cindy in the film. As Cindy pulls out of the driveway to take Frankie to school and then go to work, he yells after her, “Hey, Cin, put your seatbelt on! Hey Cin, put your seatbelt on!” A few moments later he angrily throws his cigarette at a speeding car, shouting, “Hey, fuck you! Why don’t you slow down, you fucking jackass? Motherfucker! You’re gonna kill somebody, asshole.” Towards the end of the film, Dean jealously charges the doctor for whom Cindy works as a nurse, “You’re fucking Dr. Feinberg?! You’ve been emailing my wife?!” Dean finds anything or anyone with the potential to challenge his marriage profoundly threatening; he does not want to wind up alone, like his father.
But Cindy and Dean’s marriage consistently proves unsustainable as the two discover how difficult it is not to become their parents. For most of the film, however, such a fate seems inevitable for at least one of them. If Cindy stays with Dean, she will ultimately resign herself to a life not unlike her mother’s; her marriage with Dean grows increasingly more hostile and violent. If Dean lets Cindy go, however, he will be left not unlike his father. The critical question, then, is how the two can avoid repeating at least one set of their parents’ mistakes.
Blue Valentine, I think, does provide a hypothetical answer, if not a definitive answer, to this question. It does so by deconstructing the category of “man,” a category that seems to loom large over the psyches of the film’s main characters. In one flashback Dean tells his colleague Marshall, “You’re a man amongst men. No homo!” This remark would justifiably raise the hackles of anyone! Dean’s subsequent interchange, or rather, shouting match with Cindy in Dr. Feinberg’s office, however, undercuts it. Exasperated with Dean for showing up drunk at her workplace and attempting to lure her away from it, Cindy forcefully vents her frustration by pushing Dean. What might be considered a (heated) philosophical dialogue ensues.
CINDY Fuck you! Fuck you! I’m more man than you are, you fucking
cunt!
DEAN Don’t say that shit about being a man.
CINDY I am. I am. I can handle it.
DEAN What is it with this shit and being a man? What is that? What
does it even mean?!
CINDY Yeah, what is that?
DEAN What does it mean?
CINDY You’re scaring us. You’re scaring us.
DEAN Don’t say that stuff. “Be a man!” What is that shit?
CINDY Don’t bully people.
DEAN I’ll be a man. You want me to be a man? Here, is this what
men do?
[DEAN violently shoves papers off of counters and proceeds to
trash the nurses’ office]
CINDY Oh, just stop it.
DEAN I’m a big man. Look at me. I’m a big man. I’m being a big
man.
CINDY No, I’m the man!
Here Cindy’s synecdoche—i.e., her substitution of “cunt” for “woman”—effectively devaluates the category of “woman” in contrast to the category of “man.” (This moment raises an important question: why is the slang for “vagina” one of the most derogatory and offensive words in the English lexicon?) Why does Cindy assume that a man can “handle it,” but a “cunt”—a woman—cannot? In other words, why does her ability to “handle it” necessarily mean that she is “the man”?
Dean appears to regard “the man” as a more dubious figure. Indeed, after asking Cindy what being a man entails for her, he enacts a performance of what “men do,” aggressively devastating the space around him and punching Dr. Feinberg, who has been making untoward advances on Cindy. Both Dean and Cindy, then, seem to be confused about what exactly a man is and what significance such a figure should play in their lives. Is the man always the more capable figure? Do his supposedly superior capabilities stem from his will to establish his authority, his dominion? Should a man play “the man”?
Although the concluding scenes of the drama are particularly dismal, they also contain kernels of hope. Finally, Cindy articulates what she seems to have been seeking for the duration of the film. “You’ve got to give me some space,” she enjoins Dean. Fortunately, Dean hears and heeds her request. Walking away from Cindy and her parents’ house (where Cindy and Dean’s last exchange in the film unfolds), Dean turns around when Frankie comes running after him. “Go back to your mom, please,” he asks her and then challenges her to race back to Cindy before turning around and walking off into fireworks crackling in the distance. Unlike any of the other men in the film, Dean does not play “the man.” Instead, he acknowledges and affords Cindy the space she desires, thereby relinquishing the almost tyrannical control he has heretofore exercised over her. No longer must she resign herself to playing her mother by submitting to Dean’s whims or to playing his mother by leaving him; perhaps now both characters can begin to practice roles they find more satisfying
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