Welcome to my double feature! This week I also saw The Place Beyond the Pines at the cinema so I decided to resurrect my long ignored Blue Valentine post that I failed to finish weeks ago. Both are directed by Derek Cianfrance. Haven't proof read this but I'll just post it anyways...
Blue Valentine
You always hurt the one you love.
So, in theme with the fact that when I can't get out to the cinema, I revert to watching romance films, it's not easy going. I've always meant to get round to Blue Valentine, Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams enacting a realistic dissolution of a magical Hollywood romance, along with Grizzly Bear presiding over musical responsibilities? Oh and Ryan Gosling played the ukulele. Grab the popcorn, I'm there. Except it took me about three years to get round to watching it.
Call me naive or insane, but the fireworks of an initial relationship is great and all but sometimes I'm just happier knowing my partner intimately, feeling safe and comfortable in his company and being able to be my disastrous idiotic self around him. The initial throes of any relationship are laced with uncertainty and many people love that, the electricity, the delirium, the fact that they are just starting to know one another, everything is beautiful, everything is perfect. In Like Crazy it was apparent the leads were trying to recapture those initial feelings of ecstasy unwilling to accept that their relationship had developed to a point where that was essentially gone.* Blue Valentine juxtaposes the crazy romance with the results six years down the line of diving head first into an everlasting love consequences be damned, specifically when it was flawed to begin with. It's an interesting film, it's different because let's be perfectly honest, you don't go into a Ryan Gosling/Michelle Williams romance film with Grizzly Bear scoring a twee beautiful love story and see a balding Gosling get drunk and make a scene at William's hospital where she works as a nurse full time.
Sometimes all we want is to feel that electricity, that craziness that compels us to life changing decisions, it makes us brave, or does it make us stupid? It's a malaise in society that women watch films and seeing these beautiful crazy people fall madly in love and pledge their lives together, makes them expect prince charming. That's not how life works, life is a constantly eroding process; it'll grind away and you simply can't live in a fantasy land where love fixes everything, although culture seems to champion this kind of love. Blue Valentine takes great pleasure in taking that magical love which people plunge into regardless of the consequences and shows us the consequences six years down the line, it's almost a cautionary tale, something which is completely different to your average popcorn fodder, and it's incredibly hard to watch at times.
Perhaps seeing someone who isn't in love with Ryan Gosling is a confusing prospect to me, but his balding his head and his boyish charms seem to have taken their toll, he also has a drinking problem, and no ambition, so where does that leave poor Michelle Williams? Constantly embittered at being the core provider for her family, playing bad cop to her daughter, and being harried from a mediocre life as a bog standard nurse when she had so much potential in her youth. Magical love doesn't fix these problems, and the carefree creative and beautiful Ryan Gosling doesn't stay beautiful forever. As I say, it's a hard film to watch, but it's also fascinating as we watch the burgeoning and break down of this couple's relationship. Being young carefree and in love leads to so many regrets it would seem and it's only been a short time of six years and they have aged so much and become such different people. It's just so sad! And as I have mentioned somewhere else in this blog, sad films make me sad, but also happy, so go figure.
Obviously as in any film, broad strokes are applied, there are the crowd pleasing twee romantic scenes to hammer home how cute this indie couple are, but these characters through the direction of Derek Cianfrance and the amazing Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, bring them to life and present a heartbreaking realistic representation of a disintegrating love.
The Place Beyond the Pines
If you ride like lightning, you're going to crash like thunder.
This is a film about fatherhood, but where Blue Valentine applied the rigours of reality to reckless love in order to tear it apart, the Place beyond the Pines is a much less focussed film, and it suffers from it's uncertainty in what it's trying to convey. Pines consists of three smaller vignettes which blur into one another with intersecting characters, but all have their own core characters and events, it's a much bigger wider story, but the stories seem disconnected because it's not clear, at least not to me, the purpose of three stories.
So whilst filming Blue Valentine, Ryan Gosling had a discussion with Derek Cianfrance in which he claimed he had an idea in which he could rob a bank and get away with it, the director came back to this and cast him in this film and obviously Gosling played out his plan (it's not a spoiler to say he robs a bank right?) So that's where the initial segment of the film came from, which is actually the most succinct of the three. Gosling is playing a motorbiking bad boy who travels with an amusement park, the start of the film has him pulling on his shirt after displaying his array of scrawled on tattoos, and as the titles roll it's quite a beautiful little segment following him through the crowds only seeing his back and watching him trot along; unfortunately there is no time for such calm delicate moments through the film as it continues with the action from there on, in fact it's a bit odd that my favourite part of the film happened before it actually began...
Gosling plays the bad boy with barely concealed rage issues, trying to do the right thing for his new found family, of course this leads to things going horribly wrong. Ryan Gosling is making a name for himself playing the action anti-hero and this specifically recalls Drive (even though his fashion sense in this film leaves a lot to be desired.) Some people were expecting the same film again, but where Drive was a violent gripping film, this was more considered and there was much less violence; so for those looking for a spiritual successor to Drive, you've come to the wrong place. I do love watching Ryan Gosling though, he takes great pleasure in playing characters that aren't pretty and applying a tenderness to them as well as a rage, it's impressive and interesting.
Unfortunately Ryan Gosling's section of the film is over too soon. There was a logic to his actions, his escalating desire to provide for his son and his position as a wandering soul means he has no anchor, nothing to lose apart, and he takes risks (by clearly robbing a bank if I hadn't made that clear enough) to do what he can, he's such a scarily beautiful mess...
Then Bradley Cooper takes over as a policeman with a moral quandary and a nagging wife and father. In this section the plot seems to unravel a little as we have Cooper tackling corrupt police officers, featuring Ray Liotta. I thought I understood Cooper's character's basic motivations, he wanted to do the right thing, to bring his son up in a world without such corruption and he is suffering from guilt, but then it became clear that his goals were more self serving than I first assumed and it put a bit of a dark slant on what I assumed were good intentions. Perhaps I wrinkle my nose as those who's goals are at their heart good but such people are also ambitious, I'm all for doing the right thing but that should a reward in itself, right? Once again Bradley Cooper is knocking it out of the park in his pledge to be a 'serious actor', combining this with his role in Silver Linings Playbook, he is showing everyone how good an actual actor he is, good for him!
The third section once again unravels slightly as it has even less of a clear motivation for it's core character, who is a teenage boy grappling with his disconnection from everybody else and falling into the wrong patterns. Dane DeHaan from last year's Chronicle takes the reigns here and I was pleasantly surprised and equally touched by how well his portrayal of Jason worked, all props to him, but once again his motivations are even cloudier than Cooper's as he seems outcast and lost and seems to appropriate this with his long gone father, even though he has a family and a father who raised him, he seems troubled and intrigued by the fact he doesn't know anything about his biological father. I have no idea how it must feel not to know an absent parent, but the story and the actions following through seem to facile to simply be about a young boy feeling hurt because he never knew his biological father. He's a sweet kid though, and the less said about Emory Cohen's character who strikes up a strained friendship with him, the better. Cohen sees his father making something of himself but seems happy to just cause bullshit and trouble, that just irked me.
What hurts most about this film is how hard-going it is, Blue Valentine inter-cut happier times of Gosling and Williams and their adorable flirtations and happy romance with their eroding bedrock of existence, but there is no joy to be had here; although there is a small cut of Ryan Gosling celebrating waving a dog around which I actually laughed out loud at... Otherwise it's just rough going, and slow, and tiring, and emotional and did I mention sad? And as each section makes less sense than the last it feels a lot longer than it probably was, I did look at my watch about three times. What did I take away from this film? Well, fatherhood isn't something that can be taken for granted, it's hard work, and it doesn't matter if you're there or not, your child will turn out to be a bit of a shit, congrats. Is it worth seeing? If you're a glutton for such punishment, sure.
*At least that's what the director stated in an interesting interview I read with him voicing his opinion.
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