Blue Valentine Review

Two time frames run in parallel here, and each was given its own format. Andrij Parekh shot the courtship on Super 16 with a handheld looseness that makes the first meeting on a bus feel stolen, then switched to digital for the present, where the color goes cold and the frames tighten around two people in a themed motel room. The contrast does more work than any line of dialogue.

Michelle Williams is extraordinary in the clinic scene and again at the kitchen table, where she answers a simple question about breakfast as though it were an accusation. Gosling gives Dean a defensiveness that is funny before it turns frightening, and the ukulele and tap dance outside the storefront is the rare charming scene that also explains exactly why the marriage fails.

The cutting between the two eras is not neutral, though. It is arranged so that every tender moment in the past sets up a matching humiliation, and the machinery starts to show around the hour mark. Dean carries most of the blame in the present without the past doing enough to account for the change in him. The fight at the medical center is the one stretch that tips into shouting for its own sake.