Blue Valentine DVD Blue Valentine

Product Description

Blue Valentine is the story of love found and love lost told in
past and present moments in time. Flooded with romantic memories
of their courtship, Dean and Cindy use one night to try and save
their failing marriage. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams star
in this honest portrait of a relationship on the rocks.

Love blooms and dies at the same time in the delicate dance
between Oscar nominees Ryan Gosling (
Half Nelson) and Michelle Williams (
Brokeback Mountain). Gosling’s Dean, a high-school dropout, works
for a New York moving company. While relocating a frail widower
into a retirement home, he spots Cindy, a nursing student who’s
visiting her grandmother, but the film actually begins six years
later. Married with a daughter, they live in rural Pennsylvania.
Heavy drinker Dean’s looks are fading, while Cindy still turns
heads. In his elegantly constructed second feature,
writer-director Derek Cianfrance pirouettes between past and
present, with each scene commenting on the next (set to the
bittersweet tones of Brooklyn band Grizzly Bear). The Dean of the
early years pursues Cindy, who resists at first, but a
spontaneous date ends with her tap dancing (badly) and him
singing (not so badly). She leaves her domineering boyfriend
(Mike Vogel) for this attentive stranger, leading to scenes of
intimacy that are far more suggestive than pornographic–even if
the MPAA briefly rated the film NC-17. Later, when the family dog
goes missing, the cracks in their marriage intensify, so Dean
arranges for a night of romance, which plays out like a negative
image of their first date. If the two actors, who are very good,
are meant to carry equal weight, Gosling has the more difficult
task. It’s harder to like the clingy, insecure Dean, who loves
more intensely and less wisely, but that makes Gosling’s the
braver performance.
–Kathleen C. Fennessy

Condition: New

Item# S16723405