'Blue Valentine': Bleak romance

The posters for "Blue Valentine" describe the movie as "a love story," and in case you haven't heard, that's a very bitter irony.

The love story depicted in the widely lauded "Blue Valentine" is the kind that often ends up on "Dateline," with one spouse missing and the other being interviewed in an orange jumpsuit.

Which is to say, fraught.

With anger, recrimination, and a bitter reconsideration of love itself - it isn't an illusion, it certainly has a very short shelf-life, while the misery it leaves behind lasts forever. In this sense, the movie's of a piece with other pessimistic reconsideration of the Hollywood romance paradigm, such as "The Break Up" or "500 Days of Summer" (or just about anything by Chris Nolan).

What we should expect, I guess, from the "War of the Roses" kids, weaned on divorce.

"Valentine" is the bleakest yet, a wallow in misery that director Derek Cianfrance arrived at by isolating his two leads, Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, at a Pennsylvania farmhouse where they rehearsed their characters' marital meltdown for 40 straight days.

Only 40? Why not 60, for that extra super-ultra authenticity? Somewhere, Sir Laurence Oliver is making another plea for mere acting. The goal, I guess, was a description of ruined love unrivaled in its you-are-there intimacy. Cianfrance spells it out, then underlines it in red, by contrasting it, at regular intervals, with flashbacks of the couple in the throes of new-romance infatuation (or codependency, as he suggests).

In suitor mode, Gosling plays a cute little mandolin and sings love songs to her in the rain, they make laughter-filled love, and he makes heroic gestures of devotion.

Cut to some half a dozen years later, the husband is a chain-smoking, hard-drinking comb-over guy, they're fighting over child care, he's beside himself because there are no raisins in the oatmeal.

No in between.

Nothing to explain how we went from mandolin serenades to plain oatmeal.

Just a fact of life, "Blue Valentine" declares, no explanation required. Like the poet said, we think that love will last forever, and we are wrong.

Yet I felt cheated out of something here. Not merely information (what happened?), but a dramatic structure that might have imparted meaning to this dissolving marriage.

When "Blue Valentine" ended, I knew Cianfrance had directed his actors, but I wasn't sure he'd done the hard work of writing (he's the cowriter).

Without that, "Blue Valentine" stands as a workshopped piece that looks for truth in the "reality" of the performances, and Williams is getting no end of praise for her work.

Give her credit - she's cinema's leading avatar of solemn meditations on failed lives. But I think Williams, who is lovely and loved by the camera, should now move on from roles that require unwashed hair, abject sorrow and grief at the loss of her favorite dog (see "Wendy and Lucy").

In Gosling, affectation is easier to spot. His most heartfelt relationship is with the cigarette that, unlike his wife, never leaves his side or objects to his lips.