Blue Valentine - A Lesson in Sociopsychology

Blue Valentine is one of those rare films I consider to be a must-see, especially for men. (This is no chick flick, by the way.) It illustrates perfectly the reason relationships fail. If you don't find yourself relating to at least a portion of this movie, then you've probably been living your life in a cave of ignorant celibacy.

The gist of the plot is simple, but parlayed beautifully into a vignette of the relationship of Dean and Cindy, past and present. It alternates between the naive ecstasy of their early courtship and the impending peril of their current marriage. Among its many lessons:

(***Spoiler Alert***)

-Offering a woman the standard algorithm for love (raising her children, marriage, riding off into the sunset together as a family) is no guarantee of continued attraction (and often, such actions inhibit it).

-When a man's status is peaking or dropping (Dean is perpetually employed as a laborer at a moving company and practically tells Cindy he's comfortable living up to his "potential" as a husband and father) at the same time the woman's status is rising (Cindy, after a volatile adolescence, becomes a nurse), it is a formula for disaster.

-When a man metamorphoses into a beacon of self-deprecation, thus becoming incapable of taking the leading role in a relationship (Dean continually asks Cindy "What do you want me to do?"), he has lost the allure and the power that once made him attractive to his partner.

-Once a woman has lost the love for her man because of such behavior, it is near impossible to resurrect it, especially through the modes of adjuration to logic or appeal to the feelings of children facing the specter being raised in a broken home, as a desperate Dean does in a last-ditch attempt to salvage his marriage.

-The destructive result of catching the number one "nice guy" syndrome, which is failing to understand a woman's basic nature (inasmuch as what it takes to commence and maintain attraction). Dean demonstrates a rudimentary understanding of it during the courtship, but perhaps because it came so naturally to him, he never fully comprehended why it worked in the first place, and thus could not execute the same techniques when his marriage hit the skids.

There are several more I could come up with, but that suffices for now. This movie was captivating and shrewdly subtle. It covered the prism from the soothing to the excruciating in the world of love. And the acting was brilliant. Four stars.

I understand why you put it in Social Issues but as it is a film review, I've moved it to Movies

Where you been, Mdanel??????

Oh, around... I need to check this board more often.

MDanel93 wrote:Oh, around... I need to check this board more often.

Yeah, we're fun over here. There's no Twerker for you to enjoy though.