Starring: Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams, Faith Wladyka and Mike Vogel
Directed By: Derek Cianfrance
Written By: Derek Cianfrance, Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne
Produced By: Jamie Patricof, Lynette Howell and Alex Orlovsky
Distributor: The Weinstein Company
Rating: R, for strong graphic sexual content, language, and a beating.
Running Time: Approximately 114 minutes
Website: bluevalentinemovie.com
Budget: $1 million
Genre: Drama
Release Date: January 28, 2011

Considering the most stereotypically romantic day of the year – Valentine’s Day – is just around the corner, it’s oddly fitting that a film that navigates the slow yet steady decline of a once-happy 7-year marriage is now playing in local theaters.

First-time writer-director Derek Cianfrance’s aptly-titled Blue Valentine, one of the most talked about films from the 2010 Sundance Film Festival,  casts Oscar nominees Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson and The Notebook) and Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain and Wendy and Lucy) as Dean and Cindy, a young, working-class married couple with a precocious 6-year-old daughter (Faith Wladyka) who’ve come to a major crossroads in their relationship.

Cindy works in the medical field and has designs on becoming a doctor, but her husband Dean isn’t so goal-oriented. He’s perfectly content with their blue collar life and his utter lack of ambition is one of a growing number of cons that have presented themselves to Cindy as the days and weeks and months keep passing by. Cindy’s love for Dean is conflicted by the fact that staying with him might come at too high a personal cost in the long run. But, on the other hand, leaving him may cost their daughter more. And it doesn’t help matters that she’s, for all intents and purposes, ‘the adult’ in the relationship, and he’s the man-child who shirks responsibility with a glint in his eye and a beer at the ready.

Cindy and Dean escape to a tacky theme hotel to try to rekindle the spark that they had when they first met years earlier, which we see thanks to writer-director Cianfrance’s smart decision to move fluidly back and forth along the timeline of their relationship. We see how full of life and hope they both were at the beginning and how over time all that gave way to routine and doubt. It’s truly one of the most intimate dissections of a marriage you’ll likely run across.

The film is also part mystery in that there’s no one thing or event that set them on this troubling road. The film requires you to pay attention to the fine details along the way. And those fine details and the moments in which they occur are richly played by both Gosling (who was robbed of a deserved Best Actor Oscar nomination) and Williams (who thankfully is up for the Best Actress Oscar, and deservedly so). Working without a safety net, their raw, charismatic and emotionally fluid work here easily rates among the very best of their respective careers to date.

Derek Cianfrance is a promising new writer-director who knows a thing or two about capturing emotional honesty without falling prey to unnecessary artifice. Blue Valentine is a big-screen romance worth your time.

4 stars