Why Blue Valentine is a Great Break Up Film

Blue Valentine directed by Derek Cianfrance is the perfect antidote to the increasingly terrible romantic comedy slush pile. After years of slacker-male-reforms-frigid-woman-then-finds-love movies (i.e. Knocked Up, 40 Year Old Virgin, etc), it is refreshing to see a movie where a romantic slacker gets together with a slightly more achieving woman without the cliché happy ending.

As any review will tell you, Blue Valentine is the story of Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams), and the formation and disintegration of their marriage. Not much happens in the film. The plot—if it can be described as such—follows a few days in the life of Cindy and Dean in present time. Living in rural/suburban Pennsylvania, Cindy is a nurse and Dean is a house painter. Dean seems to be the primary caretaker of their kindergartener. Cindy has a weary look, while Dean has a beer belly and oversized glasses that would be hipster if it were ironic. When the family dog Meghan dies, Dean decides to rekindle the relationship by booking the “Future Room” at a nearby hotel. There, the couple plays out all their pent up problems over the course of one evening, leading to an inevitable climax in the morning.

Throughout, the film flashes back to the couple’s courtship, six years ago. We see Cindy as a community college student, hoping to transfer to a four-year where she plans to study to become a doctor. Dean is a mover trying to find his calling. Both are hopeless romantics. Dean tells his buddies that “Men are more romantic than women. When a man meets the girl he wants to marry he knows it. But women always say they want to find the right guy, but end up marrying the guy who’s a good provider.” Cindy asks her grandmother how one knows if they are in love, trying to figure out if she should break up with her jock bf, Bobby.

And here’s where Blue Valentine makes a statement by being simultaneously both extremely romantic and extremely cynical. These two romantics manage to find each other and have a great time. Their connection is palpable in the way that Dean’s off the cuff remarks make Cindy laugh, and in the way that they manage to have fun with each other. But even so, their love crumples after six years. Now, Cindy only yells at Dean for acting like a child, and asks him whether he wants to do anything besides housepainting. Blue Valentine seems to say two things through its portrayal of the disintegration. On the one hand, it suggests that even the most profound love cannot survive the rigors of daily life. But on the other hand, we are proud of the characters for admitting their failure and trying to move on. Instead of depressingly leading a loveless life, they recognize they deserve more. This is ultimately hopeful.

Many critics have pointed out that we the film does not show the middle of the relationship, so we do not know how the relationship disintegrated. On the contrary, I think Cianfrance does a great job showing the way that the relationship has sucked the life out of both Cindy and Dean. Both characters are fundamentally the same person they were six years ago. Only their reactions to each other are soured now. Dean is no longer fun now that his antics result in extra work for Cindy. He seems to try to channel his old self in making her laugh instead of being his natural self. Even though it’s saddening that the relationship falls apart, we can also hope that both characters will find someone else with whom they share the same magic that they once did with each other.

Black Swan: All Smoke and Mirrors?

Black Swan advertises itself as a psycho-sexual thriller, when it could just as easily be labeled a parable. The psycho sexual part--while drawing most of the male audience members at the screening I attended last night--was also the most disappointing.

The plot of Black Swan is laid out early on during a speech that the dance director, Thomas, gives his ballerinas in practice. Summarizing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, he foreshadows that this will be the story of a girl turned into a white swan queen who must find love to break the spell. When her double, the black swan, seduces the prince instead, the swan queen leaps to her death.

The camera's early, constant focus on Nina Salyers (Natalie Portman) introduces her as the swan queen. Tomas awards her the part of the swan queen after she shows him a dark side by biting him. But he still admonishes her to let loose, to tap into her dark side more vigorously. How is she going to do this? Can she make this transformation while remaining herself, the film seems to ask. Darren Aronofsky's camera follows Nina closely throughout Black Swan. He produces a shaky hand held effect focusing on the back of Portman's head wherever she goes. While this effect signals that everything we see is through Nina's eyes, our position as audience members still gives us the distance to interpret Nina's experiences.

So each time that Nina sees something mysterious--the words "Whore" strewn on the bathroom mirror, or a darker doppelganger who appears at inopportune moments--we are presented with a choice. Are these sightings for real or just figments of Nina's imagination? While the movie initially seems to suggest that there might be a scientific, Portman's strained expression and the audience's knowledge of schizophrenia also lead us to believe that Portman is simply seeing things that don't exist and is otherwise paranoid. Soon after Nina gets her role, an older dancer who has just been foisted out of the company, Beth (WInona Ryder), warns her that an up and coming dancer will soon be after her role. Sure enough, Nina starts to envision her double everywhere in addition to her competitor Lily (Mila Kunis) seducing the Thomas. We can only draw the conclusion that Nina was strongly influenced by Beth's words.

The problem, of course, is that if we write off Nina as a crazy person so early on, we can no longer buy into her struggle to tap into her dark side. Nina is already far gone. There's only the matter of watching her steep and quick decline. In contrast to movies about mental decline such as A Beautiful Mind, the well being of no one seems to be at stake here. We haven't seen Nina, while admirable in her discipline, is precisely as cold as Thomas says she is. Portman wears a furrowed brow in nearly every scene and rarely cracks a smile. Her peeling cuticles only exemplify her uptight demeanor.

Black Swan is still a memorable movie, if only for Aronofsky's direction. He gives us a terrifyingly physical glimpse into the body of a ballet dancer. We see Nina's cracked toenails, skin rashes and emaciated body.

Unfortunately, these shots only emphasize Nina's frigidity. With little character development at stake, Black Swan unfolds as a retelling of Swan Lake and little more.

The Anthologist - Nicholson Baker

My negligence of this new blog only proves that I was undeserving of cindyhong.com. In the past few weeks I’ve been called away from the blog by my moving into a new apartment and by some LSAT shenanigans. Despite the lsat’s – (and a two day addiction to Top Law School forums) - I was able to read Nicholson Baker’s new book, The Anthologist.

This book is a work of fiction. But beyond that, it’s very hard to classify. Told from the perspective of a poet, Paul Chowder, The Anthologist contains background rather than a conventional plot. Paul is a known, but not star, poet who is anthologizing a book of poems, Only Rhymes. His failure to write his overdue introduction causes his long-time girlfriend, Roz, to leave him. Paul has no recourse but to write in his journal.

Readers are quickly treated to Paul’s stream-of-conscious thoughts, jumping from one topic to a tangentially related one. He writes like your ADD friend, only with more knowledge of poetry. In an especially introspective moment, he thinks, “God, I wish I was a canoe. Either that or some kind of tree tumor that could be made into a zebra bowl but isn’t because I’m still on the tree.”

As for the poetry, that is the real purpose of this book. It’s literary criticism for the layman, disguised as a novel. Paul seems to work out his thoughts just as an eccentric humanist might in real life. On the one hand, you get the feeling that Baker wanted to write a serious book on poetry, and—having trouble uniting his thoughts together in a coherent way—decided to transmit the disjointed bits through the voice of Paul Chowder. On the other hand, Paul’s voice is so earnest, so singular, that you feel like his ideas are truly original and worthy of your attention. Better yet, once you understand his points, you feel smarter too.

Paul’s key insights are that rhyme is good and that iambic pentameter is overrated. Instead, English poetry naturally consists of a four-beat rhythm where the last one is a rest. Paul entertainlingly opines:

“So the first thing about the history of rhyme . . . is that it’s all happened before. It’s all part of these huge rhymeorhythmic circles of exuberance and innovation and surfeit and decay and resurrectional primitivism and waxing sophistication and infill and overgrowth and too much and we can’t stand it and let’s stop and do something else.”

A mouthful, yes. But a provocative and illuminating one.