Catch-up Review: Blue Valentine: the turn on a microscope slide

I once went out with a girl who was perfect for me. Beautiful, outgoing, intelligent, widely-read and eager to strengthen her contract with the world around her. An expert joke and story teller, there wasn't a moment I spent with her that didn't leave me feeling enriched. It was lived in the predawn: wintry closing-time cafes, streets silver with street light, blankets, alcohol, candlelight, personal ghost tales, crescent moons in the window, secondhand books and the big black night. And then it ended. Not all at once, that never happens, but the energy drained like bathwater and suddenly it was over and every conversation was like murmurs at an autopsy, each one taking a long time to repeat the verdict: it's dead now. As in every case, for breakups are never mutual (despite the quavering lies ex couples tell), one party shuts all communication down as though the other is in genuine physical quarrantine. Well, all's fair....

But before that happened she gave me one indicator that should have been more visible in real time than I allowed it to be. This is the kind of thing we always say. "If only I'd paid attention to that when it was happening..." The fact is that we're usually so blinded by fear and self-absorption that we never notice anything that doesn't either flatter us or deliver sheer terror in the form of jealousy. What we don't get is the saddening and often eerie transformation of someone we have loved turning themself into a stranger.

One thing this girl started doing did worry me and I was right to be worried but too vain to examine it. In the lull of a conversation she would look away and say in a kind of resigned cartoon voice:

"You know so much and I know so little."

This stopped me. Every time. It gave me the creeps.

She didn't believe it to be true. It shocked me to think it was how she saw me. There was nothing I could come back with. She was neither doubting her own intelligence nor praising mine. The phrase was the first in a series of full stops that she came to use to build a barrier between us and signal that she was ready to extract herself from a mistake. She was turning herself into a stranger.

It's that moment, more than the point of definite rejection (which is, at least, a relief), that hurts the most in any failed relationship. When you witness it, even if you don't admit that you have, you understand that nothing you do or say is going to alter the silent decision that is at that moment being formed never to change. Because this can only feel like rejection (and is never admitted to be so) the perrennial suggestion by ther person doing it that you remodel the relationship as friendship is a loathsome one that I never allow to the table. This causes offence. It's meant to. It's a childish but highly satisfying response to an unfair offer. Anyway ...

The film Blue Valentine is centred on this moment. Because it keeps its eye unflinchingly upon this process the timeline-shaking progress of the narrative is not just permissible but impressive. The two lovers are visited in memory by everything they think is significant from their time together.Taken by itself, each series of recollections tells a story increasingly divergent from the other. The momentum created by this leads us to the alarming certainty that their time was really only a series of bad decisions and their pain is a result of a solid sense of self-betrayal, the type that hurts the most.

Dean and Cindy are played by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams respectively who bring every item of evidence that they are among their generation's finest. Scenes that were improvised feel natural rather than workshopped and the faces they present to us in moments like the ones I describe above are forged by experience.

While some of the dialogue and action were improvised, the director instructed his actors variously to attempt to leave the scene of an argument or try persuasion to resolve it. This has a genuinely unsettling effect and at the point where Dean holds Cindy to the floor he whispers a steadily more pathetic plea for affection for all he has done for her. Her response is to peel her knickers off and fling them to one side. It's not an invitation. It's a disruption. He backs off and frees her. This happens during an arranged dirty weekend together which is shown in fragmented form as a kind of centrepiece to the film. It is the moment when Cindy makes herself a stranger.

The visual cue to telling the difference between flashback and current time is given by different stock. The warmer moments of courtship are shot on film and the disintegration is examined in plain gelid video. Dean's hairline changes between now and then, also. Overall, things look more uncomfortably real as the certainty of the divide progresses.

That's pretty much the whole movie but if it sounds like swallowing a smog cloud then be aware that although this is a serious examination of a grim subject it's treasures lie in the candour of its performances and the sure hand at the helm. It is serious rather than earnest. It is cinema, not transposed grim tv. The elements are from a filmmaker's palette and the result even stands outside of its ethnic origins : this piece could as easily have come from Seoul or Copenhagen as New York.

After the dirty weekend gone wrong goes wrong Dean confronts Cindy in her workplace which ends disastrously and messily. I did a milder version of this with the girl I was talking about before. There was none of the violence of the scene in the movie but the effect was the same. However lightly, I had cornered her and she responded the only way she could in final rejection.

We shared our social life and there was no question of dividing friends up and that wasn't even attempted. But it meant that we still went to the same parties and nights out. I spent too long moping until the mist of it cleared and it did when I started seeing how much of a narcissistic goose she was. She would easily have thought about the same of me. It'd had only been a couple of months but we were young and that kind of thing needs to hurt when you're young. So it did and then it didn't.

There's a shot in the movie of the couple moving backwards and holding a sign that reads: IS THIS YOU?

Yeah. Well, it was.

Review: DRIVE

An action movie is about order wresting itself from chaos, changed, stronger.


Action heroes don't always know they're good people. By the end they are aware of the cost of being good and how important it is to keep up the effort. A bad action movie will have all this but it will push the stunts and pyrotechnics so far forward that that simple moral discovery gets smothered. A good action movie provides a compelling case for the action before it can take place so that we in the audience must need it to happen. True Lies is a bullshit action movie. Drive is a very good one.

Ryan Gosling's nameless driver is a creature of great precision, doing stunt work by day and working as a getaway driver for the kicks as well as the money by night. The film opens with the latter kind of job as he picks up a pair of serious looking burglars and, after a very tight wait for their remergance from the job, and gets them out of danger with a series of impressive evasive manoeuvres. He loves his skill. A flat action star just looks good between lines (Keanu Reeves). A full blooded one shows you what he's thinking and his few lines are precious. Gosling is such an one. When he isn't speaking he's observing. I first saw him as a fuckup teacher in Half Nelson and then as the profoundly damaged loner in Lars and the Real Girl and each time his casting has lifted the film he's in. Same here. By the time you see him shyly notice his beautiful young neighbour in their apartment's lift you start looking  forward to seeing how he thaws out for her. And you know it's going to take work.

Much of the attention of the rest of the cast has gone to Christina Hendricks. She does a fine job as an underworld utility but really the attention is related to her high profile role in Mad Men. It's Carey Mulligan who shines brightest here. I know her from the recent Never Let Me Go where she played the dowdy/sobering  lead. Here, outfitted with an American accent and bottle blondness, she owns her every shot. A young mother with a husband in prison she shows clear personal strength but allows a fragility through the closer she gets to Gosling's character. Also, having all those qualities but the face of a fourteen year old and the body of a woman in her twenties she is utterly disconcerting on screen.

When the crunch comes for these two it is literal and silencing. Because of the work of establishing their characters has been so full there is a genuine moment of  suspense following (no details, no spoilers) as to how this extreme shared experience will play out. It's just a moment but it's there. That's attention to detail for you.

I'm skimping on the plot details as there is just too much to potentially spoil and this is a plotty film. Suffice to say that the driver is taken from his accessory role in crime to a self-revalatory maelstrom that is as believable as it is violent. Rising action maestro from Copehagen Nicholas Winding Refn displays an effortless skill in judging when to turn the action tap on and off and how to soothe the impatient nervous system between times: rest and motion, rest and motion, wrestling and emotion. I will say that the third act felt draggy through an evenness of pacing but also that that appeared to be deliberate.

Also, thanks be for depicting gangsters who don't quote The Art of War or waffle through pages of dialogue before getting to the point. These mobsters are hard arse bastards. When points of vulnerability appear they are dealt with as they would be in life, with a swift and sure dismissal. Comedian Albert Brooks is frighteningly against type and his partner Ron Perlman also. Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston crawls back from badass into pathos effectively. And the violence, the lifeblood of the middle and final acts of any action movie is tense and ugly, the worst of it kept offscreen to prevent it from bloating beyond its purpose.

Action movies find their morality in the fatefully unacknowledged monsters of heroes. There is a song throughout the film, used initially for scenes of the driver and Irene falling in love but then entering into more extreme fare. It's a heavily 80s influenced synth pop number with thunking  bass and ethereal female vocal. The chorus goes" have you the strength to be a real human being and a real hero?" That should be as deadly as a choctop to a diabetic but it works and, blessedly, works without irony.

Go and see Drive. Now!