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I woke up this morning from a dream about
Blue Valentine. I'll spare you the specifics since there aren't any to share - it wasn't a dream where I was inhabiting the movie, but rather in my dreaming state I was simply considering the film. The funny thing is this is only symptomatic of something I've been going through for awhile - it's been just short of a full month since I saw the film at a preview screening at BAM with director Derek Cianfrance there and I haven't stopped thinking about the movie since. Every single day it's come to mind, for some reason or another. And now it's even haunting my sleeping thoughts!
Oh sure, you say, we know
you - you're just thinking about Mike Vogel's ass half of those times you're thinking about the film. And I can't entirely dispute that claim. Mike Vogel's ass haunts me nearly as much as Michelle Williams trying to stifle her tears at her daughter's play or Ryan Gosling's fumbling stab at coerced cunnilingus. I am me.
But what's really been keeping the film a stealth ghost at my back is its Grizzly Bear soundtrack. The band did all of the music for the film and I'm a well-avowed spazz for their stuff and so as often as they come onto my iPod's shuffling playlist, which is a couple times a day, there's
Blue Valentine, sad sad
Blue Valentine, staring me in the face. Just yesterday
The Playlist posted about the soundtrack, which isn't out until February 1st. They gave us the track listing, which shows one simple thing: this
film is scored with some of my favorite music that's ever been written. It's sort of a 90 minute Grizzly Bear video, just with a lot of great acting. Not ACTING mind you, but Acting, one capital letter, at least.
But it's a simple fact for me to state that if you score the scene in your relationship movie where the emotional wallop you've been slowly building to culminates to "Shift (Alternate)" by Grizzly Bear, otherwise known as my single favorite song by them and otherwise otherwise known as one of my favorite songs written by anyone ever in any time or place, ever, then you can be pretty assured that I am going to find your movie a moving experience.
I don't know why I haven't gotten around to writing about the film yet. A lot of stuff got in the way - I was sick the week before the holidays, and then the holidays slammed into me and sat on my face smothering me for a couple weeks. As the time passed I worried I wasn't going to be able to write about the film - that it might lose its power with time, that the words wouldn't come. But it hasn't - it's spell has really only gotten stronger. I was going to try and wait for my Golden Trousers awards, to just save my thoughts for then because no doubt the movie's gonna be featured therein.
But this morning's inspiration's sort of taken me over. The film is swallowing me up today. "Shift (Alternate)," which I listened to on repeat on my way to work today, is looping in my head. Mike Vogel's ass is there under my eyelids. Ryan Gosling is shambling down the street towards some fireworks and I want to cry, and cry, and cry some more. It seems as if there's a bittersweet love story of sorts that I fall in love with every year -
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
Brokeback Mountain, I'm a Cyborg But That's OK,
Once,
Synechdoche New York (don't you look at me like that), -
Blue Valentine is as sad and as sweet and as true to matters of the heart as any of them, and Dean and Cindy's romantic collapse, inter-cut with its lingering elation, won't be shaken off here any time soon.
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