Entertainment

‘Blue’ velvet

The broken-love movie has to be as intricately conceived as the heist flick. “Blue Valentine,” a small but shattering film that marks its writer-director, Derek Cianfrance, as an artist of real depth, observes relationship dynamics at a molecular level, welling with as much understanding as Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage.”

Dean (Ryan Gosling), a janitor’s son and career laborer, has all he wants out of life: a lovely wife, Cindy (Michelle Williams), who to him can do no wrong, and a little daughter to play with. It’s immediately obvious, though, that something isn’t right. When Dean and the girl, Frankie, sneak up on the sleeping Cindy as though re-enacting a breakfast cereal commercial, she isn’t even a little amused.

Even as the story flashes back from the principals’ poisoned exhaustion to their sweetly tantalizing flirtation years ago, it becomes clear that this marriage couldn’t have worked and shouldn’t have been attempted. It turns out that Cindy is a nurse who could have been a doctor, that Frankie wasn’t planned, that Dean has wit and talent but no ambition. The film is an investigative report on everyone’s unhappiness. Even the dog has gone missing. On the surface, then, “Blue Valentine” is fairly routine indie drama — depressive, tightly constrained, almost without brightness or levity. Yet it rises far above the expected, on all levels, as Cianfrance’s unforced acuity invests every detail with importance. And Williams and Gosling are exceptionally moving. Both of them probably have Oscars in their future, though not for this melancholy work.

His character — outfitted within an inch of being a supporting player on “My Name Is Earl”— could easily have turned into a stereotype of a working stiff. Yet if Gosling chooses speech patterns that seem a little emphatically unlettered — Dean failed to complete high school — he works beautifully with the penetrating script (by Cianfrance, Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne) to create a man of sudden talents, unexpected acts of kindness and delightful surprises. He simply, fatally, doesn’t want very much. When Cindy urges him to find a job that isn’t so depressing he needs a drink in the morning, he turns it back on her: “I have a job that I can drink at 8 o’clock in the morning . . . this is the dream.”

He likes who he is. She doesn’t. She would like him to be someone else, quickly.

Cindy is prickly and at times a little cruel, but it’s devastatingly clear that Dean is not the man for her, and perhaps never was. She married him because of practicality, and because he was sweet with a ukelele one dappled and perfect night.

Without ever saying so, “Blue Valentine” is centrally about class, and class, in America, anyway, is centrally about much more than income — it’s about tastes and values, as we see when Dean’s idea of a healing getaway means a cheesy lovers’ motel. It seems obvious that if Dean had arranged such a trip with cool irony instead of urgent eagerness, Cindy would have accepted it in a larky spirit. And if Dean painted canvases instead of houses, his lack of accomplishment wouldn’t be an issue.

American filmmakers largely avoid class, which is fine because virtually all of them were well-born and tend to portray their inferiors as piteous, comical or (especially when they’re minorities) as sprites whose magical simplicity can be used to cure the angst of therapy-needing professionals. “Blue Valentine” resists such glibness and makes us look deeper. It’s not an easy film, but the force of its compassion is equal to the strain of its sorrows.

kyle.smith@nypost.com