BLUE VALENTINE

Written by Derek Cianfrance, Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne

Directed by Derek Cianfrance

Starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams

Cindy: How do you trust your feelings when they can just disappear like that?

Gramma: I think the only way to find out is to have those feelings.

When they say, “For better of for worse,” in wedding vows, I believe they are referring to BLUE VALENTINE in regards to the worse part. Novice feature filmmaker, Derek Cianfrance’s latest is a very particular snapshot of a very specific place in a relationship that far too many people know far too well. And only few of those people live to tell the tale with their wits still about them. In reality, this space is an incredibly difficult test of the mind, the spirit and the heart and every effort is usually made to avoid getting there. It is one of the darkest stages a relationship can reach but Cianfrance is not the least bit afraid of the dark.

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, an indie dream couple if I’ve ever heard one before, are Dean and Cindy, a young couple with a little girl, living their married life in rural Pennsylvania. They have been together for six years but those years have been far from kind. At the moment we meet them, Dean is feeding his daughter breakfast while Cindy is getting ready for work – an ordinary morning for many a couple, I’m sure. The difference here is that this kitchen is weighted down with a crushing tension that is evident in every look given and every word spoken. She seems appalled by his every action and influence over their daughter and he seems to know it. The room is rotten with the stench of hatred.

Dean and Cindy know they don’t have much time left and decide to get a room at a cheap motel in New York City for the night in hopes of working through their issues and rekindling their romance. Their intentions are sincere but the fight is so insurmountable at times, they each struggle with their resolve. Gosling, while somewhat overwrought in his character’s intensity, must be commended for the amount of evident effort he made to make Dean real and not just a bad husband. That said, Williams is heartbreaking every moment she is on screen. Even the manner in which she clasps her fists during one of the film’s many sexual moments is emotionally devastating. Together, they genuinely feel like two people who have been oscillating between love and hate for years, so much so that it can be too much to take at times.

Cianfrance is a brave man for going to as many places of despair in BLUE VALENTINE as he does but he’s not stupid. He knows that an audience needs to breathe so he tells the entire story of their relationship in moments so that we can see that there once was a time when these two knew happiness, that there is another reason other than their daughter that they are fighting to stay together. The device is somewhat manipulative at times as its obvious point is to make us feel even worse that their relationship doesn’t seem to be salvageable. BLUE VALENTINE did make me feel pretty bad. I had been in some variation of that relationship in my life and it was hard enough to deal with then so, as fantastic as the film is in its most candid moments, I’m not sure everyone is ready to go back there again.

IT'S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY

Written and Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

Starring Keir Gilchrist, Emma Roberts, Lauren Graham and Zach Galifianakis

Craig: I want to kill myself.

Nurse: Fill this out.

I have to begin by saying that IT’S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY is not really a funny story at all. In fact, it isn’t even that funny. It tries to be, and on occasion it can be, but the reason it isn’t is pretty simple. It shouldn’t be. This is the story of a supposedly suicidal teenager who checks himself into a mental hospital for fear he won’t be able to hold on much longer. Last I checked clinical depression bordering on suicide wasn’t a laughing matter and mental wards were not warm and fuzzy places where teens could come of age.

When writing/directing team, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, first tackled depression and isolation, they gave us the harrowing indie drama, HALF NELSON, which earned Ryan Gosling an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a crack-addicted, high school teacher. It was bleak, honest and raw. Just a few short years later though, they have seemingly lost all integrity as artists and their ability to be truthful to their own story and directorial instincts. From the moment Craig (Keir Gilchrist) enters the adult mental ward (the adolescent ward was conveniently undergoing renovations to allow for more implausibility and hopeful hilarity), everything feels false. Despite the fact that Craig’s problems amounts to girl troubles and pressure from his Dad (Jim Gaffigan) to get into the right college, he is admitted for a week. It takes him about a day to realize that his problems are really nothing compared to his new neighbours, allowing for six more days of learning valuable life lessons from adorable and endearing mental patients. They’re crazy, but who isn’t really?

If Craig doesn’t really need to be there, I’m not sure why Boden and Fleck think that their audience will feel any need to be there either. The ensemble do their best to comply, including a surprisingly restrained performance from Zach Galifianakis and a refreshingly vibrant one from Lauren Graham, but ultimately, they look lost, unable to figure out why they’re there too. There is humour in pain and we can be found when we are amongst the most lost but by making light of the dark places these patients go, Boden and Fleck only come off as lost themselves.

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL

Written by Nancy Oliver
Directed by Craig Gillespie


Dagmar: Sometimes I get so lonely I forget what day it is and how to spell my name.

Novice film director, Craig Gillespie, would like you to meet Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling). Lars lives in a small, northern American town where everyone knows each other. Lars works in a dreary office where the most excitement revolves around his cubicle-mate’s missing action figures. He lives next door to his brother and pregnant sister-in-law (Paul Schneider and Emily Mortimer) in what is not so much a place of his own as it is his brother’s garage. He doesn’t like to be touched; in fact, he considers the often-casual act of embracing to be painful, like the feeling your feet get when they’re thawing after a long time in the freezing cold. He lives a solitary life in the safety of his dark, underdone home, watching curiously from his window. If you were to ask him if he was lonely or if he were OK, he would say he was fine and finish the conversation before you could probe any further. Lars is that guy that everyone always knew had problems but no one was willing to put aside their own long enough to help. In LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, Gillespie is more than happy to introduce you to Lars Lindstrom, if only so someone can look at him instead of away from him and see this beautiful human being that has been ignored for far too long.


There is one person in Lars’s life that doesn’t look away. Her name is Bianca. Bianca allows Lars to be himself and loves him for who he is. The only problem with Bianca is that she isn’t real. She arrived at Lars’s door one day in a large wooden box after he ordered her online six weeks earlier. She is made of plastic, has real hair and is anatomically correct. Even though she is designed for sex play, Lars brings her to life for a safe return of love. It is funny at first but it quickly becomes horribly awkward. Suddenly, those that were thought to be closest to Lars realize that they allowed for this to happen by not stepping in earlier. Upon covert psychological analysis (by Patricia Clarkson in a stoic, frank performance that is brutally honest while always sensitive), Lars is diagnosed as having a delusion. Maybe he believes that if people see him with Bianca they will stop judging him for being so pathetically lonely. Maybe it’s as simple as he just wanted someone to talk to. No matter what the reason that led to this mental snap though, Bianca’s arrival is the best thing that could have happened to Lars and to everyone who knows him. Despite the minor inconvenience of her being inanimate, her relationship with Lars brings him back to life.

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL is bravely independent. Gillespie has taken Nancy Oliver’s script/psychological case study and ensured that we as viewers are never allowed to look away from Lars, no matter how uncomfortable we may be. That said, the film experience itself is certainly not an easy one. Lars is not a clumsy yet endearing kind of awkward. He is a man with real problems and rich history that is unveiled piece by piece throughout the film. Fortunately for the film and the audience, Lars is played by a young actor who is not afraid to explore the dark place Lars calls home (and I’m not talking about the dank garage where he sleeps). Gosling is sincere in his suffering, in his caring and in his instability. Both he and Gillespie never allow for Lars to drift into caricature or ridicule. The earnestness of Gosling’s performance, from his difficulty getting words out to his flinching body language, inspires genuine sympathy from the audience and saves the performance from being the farce it could have been in the hands of a lesser actor. It also elevates the film to a compelling study in humanity as the manner in which the townsfolk react to Lars and Bianca says novels about their decency and compassion or lack thereof.


LARS AND THE REAL GIRL is sure to repel some but is extremely cathartic if you allow for it to work its magic on you. Even “magic” is not the right word as there is nothing magical about this movie. Considering it’s about a relationship between a man and a blowup doll, it is shockingly real. Loneliness is real. Mental anguish is real. Bianca may not be real but the love Lars feels for her is and the experiences that led to this delusion are valid and should not be ignored. Perhaps it isn’t just that Lars needed someone to talk to or someone to have as a standing Saturday night date. Perhaps Lars created Bianca to show himself that he truly deserved love despite it never showing its face to him before. In doing so, maybe he would learn that he already had an abundance of it.

HALF NELSON

Written by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck
Directed by Ryan Fleck

A teacher tries to open the minds of a class of inner-city high school students. Plainly put, the premise of HALF NELSON sounds like a movie we’ve all seen too many times before but this is not that movie. HALF NELSON doesn’t soften the hard or smooth over the rough. It opens with Ryan Gosling as Dan Dunne, waking up to his day. He looks exhausted, dirty. As he stumbles around for his pants, he even looks deathly. Mr. Dunne is an 8th grade history teacher and a basketball coach. He is also a drug addict who has cut himself off from as much human intimacy as possible. After coaching a losing game and having an awkward conversation with an ex-girlfriend, his two worlds crash into each other in the girls’ locker room. When he thinks everyone has left, he lights up his crack pipe in a bathroom stall and falls into the high until he hears footsteps. The stall door opens and he stares blankly, curled up on the toilet, at the face of Drey (Shareeka Epps), one of his history students. He insists he’s fine but he isn’t fooling either one of them. She helps him off the floor and into his car. By the time he drops her off, an unlikely friendship has begun, a star performance is being built by Gosling and a brilliantly engaging film is well under way.

Despite his dependence, Mr. Dunne manages to make it to class fairly often. His students, he claims on more than one occasion, are possibly the only thing in his life that keeps him sane. In the classroom, he has purpose. That purpose, he has decided despite the school principal’s protests, is to prepare his students for mental and emotional challenges life will present when they leave high school. Though he is supposed to be teaching the details surrounding the civil rights movement, he prefers to lecture on the philosophy behind how such a change comes about. His approach, albeit unorthodox, is effective. His students are attentive and encouraged to think progressively. Mr. Dunne believes change is brought about when two opposing forces reach a turning point where one force will ultimately overpower the other force. He illustrates this point with a friendly game of arm wrestling. The paradox of a man so intent on inspiring others when he has so little interest in inspiring himself is both fascinatingly twisted and painfully heartbreaking to watch. My heart goes out to Mr. Dunne but all the while, I want to shake him out of his funk.


Keeping with the theme of opposing forces, Mr. Dunne’s relationship with Drey serves as a mirror to the state his life has reached. Drey is a 13-year-old girl who is growing up mostly on her own as her father has left, her mother is always working and her older brother is in jail. She is in need of a solid adult influence in her life and her choices are between Mr. Dunne, a man who has long ago given up on his future and a neighborhood drug dealer who would like to recruit her as part of his crew. Evidently, she has her own opposing forces to deal with. While she is necessarily more mature than the majority of her peers, she is still a teenager and struggles to know her place, especially in relation to Mr. Dunne. There is clearly an admiration as she hangs off every word of his lectures, possibly even a crush. Still, her most mature awareness, and this can be directly attributed to Epps’ stunningly understated performance, is that Mr. Dunne needs her more than she needs him. As he has no friends, he needs an impartial person in his life to remind him about the simple and touching aspects of human interaction. Her beauty grows out of her instinctual impulse to help.

A “half nelson” is a wrestling move that, when applied correctly, prohibits the person in the hold from being able to free him or herself from the hold until they submit to defeat to stop the pain. In the case of Dan Dunne, the drug addiction in his life is the perpetrator of that move and he admitted defeat a long time ago, acknowledging at this point in his life that he only takes the drugs to get by these days compared to his earlier days when he took them to forget. I honestly don’t know which is worse. HALF NELSON is a transfixing character study, thanks in great part to Gosling’s impressive versatility. In many ways, he himself encompasses two opposing forces at the same time but with the hold his drug usage has on his life, it isn’t likely he’ll reach his turning point any time soon, if at all.