Dir. Derek Cianfrance , US, 2010, 112 mins
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams, Mike Vogel
Review by Carol Allen
This is the story of a marriage on the rocks, which takes place in both the present and the past which created that present.
On the surface Dean (Gosling) and Cindy (Williams) look like any other modern couple. They are juggling the demands of work and family and have a little girl whom Dean in particular adores. He scratches a living as a house painter and is their daughter’s main carer, as Cindy has a demanding and exhausting career as a nurse. Go beneath the surface though and we realize their marriage has reached crisis point. He drinks and whines all the time, she is constantly exhausted. With a well constructed screenplay and clever use of flashbacks Cianfrance reveals the story of their relationship from their first meeting to the day when they make one last effort to save their marriage.
It’s a good story with a universal resonance, as the past gradually illuminates the present for us. Gosling is particularly good. The contrast between him as a gentle, kind young man and the balding, bespectacled, chain smoking scruff he has become is striking and moving. Having already seen them in the present, the flashback to their first meeting when young, which takes place in an old people’s home, where Dean is helping an old man move in his treasured few possessions and Cindy is visiting her grandmother, is both touching and tells us a lot about Dean in particular – his basic kindness and decency and his romantic ambition to find the true love that the old songs sing about. He first though has to win Cindy away from her male chauvinist jerk of a boyfriend – an effectively boorish performance by Vogel – and her equally unpleasant father – interestingly portrayed by John Doman. The revelation of the circumstances surrounding their daughter’s birth works particularly well dramatically and there is also a scene, when Cindy is seeking an abortion, which not only elicits sympathy for her character but is disturbingly graphic.
At the same time as telling us how this couple got to where they are, for the scenes in the present Cianfrance uses a lot of close ups and some interestingly constructed shots to take us into the inner world of the friction, tension and edginess behind the façade of this average early middle aged couple.
Disappointingly though he doesn’t totally succeed in doing that. There are a lot of sex scenes in the film, including a sequence where Dean takes Cindy to a cheesy, “live out your sexual fantasies” motel in a last ditch effort to win her back, but apart from telling us that they’ve never had a very successful sex life together, which we can get in one, these scenes don’t throw as much light on their relationship as one suspects they are supposed to. And to be blunt, the characters aren’t that interesting, though Gosling, despite older Dean’s often bad behaviour, does succeed in capturing our sympathy for his situation. As far as Cindy is concerned, it would be good to know more about the process by which she gets from being a career no-hoper in her youth to training as a nurse. It’s an important part of her story and is glossed over. At the end of the film, it’s still not really clear as to how their marriage went wrong; only that it was entered into for well intentioned but problematical reasons. You are left with the impression that the film believes it is more important and perceptive than it actually is. Gosling is though as usual well worth watching.
