Falling in and out of love

No bolt from the blue: Michelle Williams stars with Ryan Gosling in his latest role as yet another odd romantic

BLUE VALENTINE (15)

Director: Derek Cianfrance

Running time: 120 minutes

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OPENING a month too early for Valentine's Day, Blue Valentine is less a great date movie and more a grim warning that, while you may fall in love quickly, disillusionment and painful extrication from a poor personal choice can drag on for years.

First-time writer-director Derek Cianfrance spent 12 years scripting his romantic drama about a nurse who falls for a nice but feckless loser, but his story feels older and more familiar than that. Cindy (Michelle Williams) once dreamt of becoming a doctor but had to settle for an auxiliary job. Her dissatisfaction with her life is anchored to her marriage to Dean (Ryan Gosling), who is happy to drift along as a house painter so he can spend time with the six-year-old daughter they are raising together. Cindy is overworked, Dean is tired of being nagged, and an attempt to respark the marriage with a dirty weekend in a hotel ends in brutal rejection.

If you wonder how this snippy couple ever thought they were compatible in the first place, Blue Valentine attempts to provide some answers by intercutting the events that first brought them together as students - a kind act, a rotten ex-boyfriend, an unplanned pregnancy - as well as the current irritations that are driving them apart.

The film's sweetest moment is their first date where Dean improbably brings along a ukulele and gets Cindy to perform a penguin shuffle of a dance in the doorway of a shoe shop. Almost too significantly, their song is You Always Hurt The One You Love.

A lot of Blue Valentine is a bit mannered and self-consciously symbolic, as if a talented sixth-year pupil had been asked to tackle Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. Unlike Woolf, the time span for disintegration here is a mere six or seven years. Time enough for Cindy to sour convincingly on her husband and his cheesy ideas of romance perhaps, but some of the other changes - Gosling's receding hairline and 1970s sports reporter sunglasses, for instance - are more abruptly alarming.

Yet while the staging is overcooked, the emotional intelligence driving the blue collar lovers is touching and unpatronising. Williams has the more thankless task of getting fatter, more shrewish and unsympathetic, but she is impressive in moments that call for less intensity and more of a lived-in sense of stoic misery. Gosling's good-hearted puppy-friendly Dean is more likeable but the role is also familiar if you have seen his other films. Gosling is an intriguing actor, but perhaps it's time he started seeking out characters who are not odd, intense romantics. After The Notebook, Lars And The Real Girl, Stay and The United States Of Leland, audiences may start to guess the drill whenever he appears - a little like Sam Neill in the 1990s: whenever he turned up in a movie, you knew poor old Sam was about 12 minutes away from being cuckolded.

Anecdotal, self-aware and agonised, Blue Valentine tends to pay dividends in terms of character rather than plot and dialogue. In other words, it boasts the kind of displays of raw acting that award ceremonies and festival juries could well fall in love with, but married moviegoers might decide that their own brand of misery is quite sufficient. v

On general release from Friday