Late Friday Film Reflection: Fragile and Fleeting Loves
“Maybe a little, in the beginning,” Cindy’s grandma admits to her in Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine. “He didn’t really have any regard for me as a person. You gotta be careful of that. You gotta be careful that the person you fall in love with is worth it…to you.”
Cindy, played by Michelle Williams, had asked her grandma what it felt like to fall in love, and her grandma confided that she never really found love, not even with her husband. As we would expect, Cindy is less than comforted by this admission, and she thinks about her parents’ failure and her own future: “I never want to be like my parents. I know they must’ve loved each other at one time right? To just get it all out of the way before they had me. How do you trust your feelings when they can just disappear like that?”
While we witness this exchange, we know that Cindy will soon meet and marry Dean (Ryan Gosling), and that this young couple will face these questions intensely when, for no apparent reason, their marriage begins to unravel. There’s no infidelity or cataclysmic force that pulls them apart. They each have their admirable and despicable qualities—revealed often simultaneously with impressive skill by Williams, Gosling, and Cianfrance’s direction—but these don’t suddenly trigger a landslide so much as slowly wear away the ties the bind them.
Dean is still in love with Cindy and tries to recapture the passion they felt at the start of their relationship, but Cindy seems to have given up hope for their shared happiness. She goes along with Dean’s plan for a steamy date to make things right, but she’s not at all bothered when work calls her away. She prefers the company of expectant mothers to time with her husband, and we come to see the reasons why.
Blue Valentine is a romantic drama that’s difficult to watch because it painstakingly marries Dean’s hope to Cindy’s despondency: I couldn’t decide whether or not I wanted the two to stay together or whether or not it would be good for them to continue on their up and down, but mostly downward path. Even if Dean and Cindy were to rekindle their love, would it matter in the long run? I sympathized with Dean’s desire to stay true to his marriage vows, but I also understood Cindy’s depression, disillusionment, and realization that their marriage may have been a mistake. It’s fair to wonder if she ever really loved him, or if she settled against her better judgment while in a moment of heart-wrenching vulnerability.
Cianfrance’s film reminded me a little of David Gordon Green’s 2003 movie, All the Real Girls, another quiet and perceptive story about the youthful idealizing of love meeting the cold, harsh realities of…ordinary life. Paul Schneider plays Paul as a likeable and ever-so-slightly awkward womanizer who, to his surprise, falls in love with his best friend’s 18-year-old sister, Noel (Zooey Deschanel). She loves him too, and they begin to date secretly so as not to incur the wrath of her brother.
Paul’s experience with “love” doesn’t include experience with, you know, love, so his attraction to Noel comes to him as something new, special, and exciting on a much deeper level than what he’s used to. I’m pretty sure Green wants us to see Paul as genuinely in love, as opposed to just manipulative and horny. In a moment of bravery and candor, Paul tells Noel, “The first time I had sex, I was thirteen years old, and it was in a cinderblock basement with this older girl that I didn’t know. When we were finished…I was nervous, and I was trying to be cool, and I told a joke and it was just stupid and…she never spoke to me again. I just wanna make sure that a million years from now, I can still see you up close and we’ll still have amazing things to say…I’m gonna go now, okay?”
Despite their love and his caution and care, their relationship doesn’t progress in accordance with his hopes and dreams, and not just because his best friend discovers he’s dating his virgin sister. Noel has her own life to live and her own decisions to make, and not every choice she makes fits with Paul’s well-intentioned fantasy. Nor should they, and that’s something Paul has to learn.
You may remember Wesley in The Princess Bride telling Buttercup that death can’t stop true love. I always liked that sentiment, and I want to believe it’s true, but is it always? Must true love last a lifetime? Because, as these two films take pains to portray, love sure seems a stoppable force, and it doesn’t take death to bring it to a halt: the mundane, the passage of time, the piling up of daily frustrations—these seem sufficient to hit the brakes. It would be easy to say that the true love we romanticize into an ideal (and in romantic comedies!) doesn’t truly exist, but neither of these films seems to be saying that. Rather, contra the Beatles, you need more than true love.
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An aside: Green’s most recent film was the disappointing but watchable fantasy stoner comedy Your Highness, an overly raunchy tale that may be an ironic portrayal of the male adolescent sexual ideal that’s sometimes associated with fantasy movies, if I give Green and writer Danny McBride the benefit of the doubt.
After nearly 40 years, I have found true love to be defined very much by the fact that it endures and becomes stronger with trial. It is easy to fall in love with the idea. Sexual passion especially in the young can be convincing. True love is being with the one you love when they are sick, troubled, or just in the next room. True love is when you look into their eyes and still see the spark. True love is when after decades their hug still comforts and pleasures. True love is walking around the store disagreeing, but still letting your spouse buy that little thing that makes them happy, sensible or not.
Well what do you expect from the eros/romantic type of love orchestrated by imperfect humans in a movie like this? It isn’t the highest form, which is Caritas, that is perfectly orchestrated by God, and his Son.
But as an obvious note, it’s hollywood of the 21st century, chum. They tackled “love” better in cinema’s infancy and even a couple decades before (it’s “teenage years”).