I got off my regular movie beat of war, its causes, outcomes and human behavior this past weekend and landed in marital dysfunction land.  Of course war is just the largest acting out of man’s cruelty to man.  There are many other ways and some who wonder if men’s violence to women is connected in the brain to men’s violence to men.  That’s not why I watched Blue Valentine with Michelle Williams as Cindy and Ryan Gosling as Dean in Blue Valentine (2010) on Friday night. I’m not sure how I got there, though the reviews, post-viewing, were on the superlative side. I had come away feeling differently. It was like watching Fight Club for married couples.

What we see is about 24 hours at the end of a marriage and possibly a week at the beginning, the lovely — in memory anyway– meeting, and tumbling and falling in love, the two times interleaved as flashbacks during the breakup.

We know things are not idyllic when father and five year old daughter dive into the late-morning bed of the sleeping mother, bouncing and rousting her up.  She is not pleased, and not merely annoyed.  Really angry.  What’s up with that? we want to know.  Then the dog goes missing.  Dad swings the 5 year old, cigarette smoke curling from his lips.  We don’t like this, but maybe it was years ago before cigarette cool became cigarette cruel.

Dad is on time for child’s school play.  Mom is late, it turns out because she has found the dog. As a body. The little girl is taken to her grandfather’s house for an over-night while the parents bury the dog.  A blast of anger by him over her not locking the gate, leading to the dog’s death is unfeeling. We are a bit uneasy about him.

He knows things are not right.  His solution?  Since the little girl is gone for the night go to an adult motel and revive their earlier passion.  This does not turn out well.  The acting is quite incredible, meaning it’s very hard to watch — perhaps like your own break up, in its worst days, on the big screen.

The problem for me, aside from the final hurt, the walk away, not a glimmer of possible renewal is that the lovely days of their meeting and the terrible days of their parting were like the bookends of a story that wasn’t there.  Living in America today we can use our lives and those of our friends to fill in the blank pages, but the movie doesn’t ‘t do that for us — which makes it less a narrative to me than two before-and-after photos — as of a glacier’s melting.  Only with the glaciers we know the connection is rising temperatures.  With the couple we don’t know — not because there are no choices but because there are plenty of them.

She’s grown up and he hasn’t (a typical conceit in today’s marital commentariat.)  She’s guilty about her promiscuous past and is over compensating by being super-serious, forgetting why she fell in love. He is a drunk and a run-around, though we aren’t shown it. She wants out of motherhood and partnership.

Some will blame him for not seeing her exhaustion or being aware of his own behavior.  Some will blame her for shutting him down and out without a word of explanation, or tries at tenderness.  For many however, it will be a wrenching scene of hopelessness, love gone sour without much to be done about it.  For me it was a story left untold. Director’s option, of course, but not satisfying for those who are interested in not just the facts of human behavior but how the mystery happens.

 The scenes of their early courtship are very well done, especially Dean’s tenderness and willingness to marry her and father the child not knowing if it is his.  His idiosyncratic rendition of “We Only Hurt the Ones We Love“, completely re-make the song and while foreshadowing the sorrow we are already in the midst of seeing, imprint him as a sweet, if goofy, guy.

Several moments seem off-kilter in the movie.  After a graphic intercourse scene Cindy is furious with the boyfriend — the one before Dean.  Later, in a grimly realistic interview in an abortion clinic she is asked how many sexual partners she has had.  After a moment of thought she replies, twenty five.  She is either still in, or just out of high-school.  Perhaps she was speaking out of a misplace bravado, though there is no indication this is so.  If not, if she was so experienced, then anger at the lack of a condom, or loss of it during the act, doesn’t make sense.  Irritation, sure, but with that much experience this particular one won’t have been new.

She herself grew up in a violent home.  In one disturbing scene her father furiously shames her mother at dinner.  Yet, 6 years later, Cindy is bringing her own daughter to a seemingly doting grandfather, now on oxygen, for an overnight. Is this the same man?

Dean’s final explosion of anger in Cindy’s place of work after she has left him at the motel without a car travels down the road of irrational male anger — but without roots in his past behavior.  During their courtship he suffered a nasty beating by the boyfriend (and friends) she was leaving, without macho posturing or fighting back.  The scene, again, superbly acted, seemed not grown from the character but from a need to have a reason for her final shutting him out.

Unbearable stuff for those who have been through the swamps of reality shift themselves, and told to a T.  The antithesis of a date-night movie.  The problem for such as me, who want a story, of connected episodes and plausible cause and effect, the result of seeing such a before and after juxtaposition is to leave me not curious but querulous. Shit happens is a popular stock phrase but actually there are very interesting, relevant and reality rooted reasons why it does.  I would have been interested in knowing more of the story from director Derek Cianfrance and writer Joey Curtis