Movie Moment: Blue Valentine

I waited to rent Blue Valentine until it was 50% off.  Because I like my heartache at a discount. 

Simply stated, it's about a young married couple that has fallen out of love.  Dean (Ryan Gosling) is a house painter, and Cindy (Michelle Williams) is a nurse.  They have one child, a five-year-old daughter named Frankie.  Dean's "the fun one" and an attentive dad, but he drinks too much.  Cindy is a nag who won't let him touch her. This is how we first meet them, a setting that makes it easy to feel sorry for Dean and to wish that Cindy would soften a little.  But then the flashbacks start.  Like favorite photographs, they slip in and out through the couple's present misery, revealing how they fell in love and how they got to be where they are now.  A world of subtlety is unraveled in those snapshots, and it becomes clear that Dean and Cindy's relationship, although once seemingly pure, was disintegrating even as it was being built.  Before even meeting Cindy, Dean says something that foreshadows their demise.  Men, according to him, are more romantic than women because they live their lives resisting commitment until one amazing woman comes along and changes their minds.  Women, on the other hand, are always ready for commitment but weigh their options, choosing to settle down with the man who makes the most money.  Dean says all of this naively, yet is so convincing that even I had to stop and wonder if maybe we women are just a bunch of unfeeling opportunists.  But by the end of the movie, I realized that Dean's words had prophesized the problems that would result between him and Cindy.  He thinks finding the right person, that one amazing woman, is enough.  He doesn't realize that he needs to work at his relationship to keep it going, that's it's not ultimately how much money he makes that will determine his wife's happiness, but the level of emotional support he's willing to give her.  (Sorry to get all Dr. Phil on you, but it's true.)  Knowing this, my loyalties reversed, and I began rooting for Cindy to break free of Dean.  The movie is crafty this way, manipulating your viewpoint to unveil the truth through the most accurate lens.  Watching it is uncomfortable, but then, it's supposed to be.  Blue Valentine, after all, is a dirty-dish-towels-exposed slice of life, not a detergent commercial fantasy.

It's good, though.  Layered and gritty and all of those other things that make you think and feel.  I'm glad I shelled out the $2.99.                    

Promises, Promises

Yesterday, my mom and sister and I went to New York's Broadway Theatre to see "Promises, Promises," starring Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth. It was a revival of a 1960s play of the same name, which was based on an earlier 1960s movie, The Apartment, starring Jack Lemon and Shirley MacLaine. In a nutshell, it was the story of a lowly office worker, C. C. "Chuck" Baxter, who gets sucked into lending his apartment to the senior executives for rendezvous with their mistresses only to discover that the girl he's in love with, Fran Kubelik, is his boss's, mistress. It's cute and campy yet underscored by the shadows of the male chauvinism that dominated the workplace of the 1960s. (One review I read aptly compared it to Mad Men.) But unlike Mad Men (SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!), "Promises, Promises," finds a moral high ground and stakes its claim there. Ever the "good guy," Chuck saves Fran after a failed suicide attempt brought on by the news that Mr. Sheldrake is not leaving his wife. By the time Mr. Sheldrake crawls back to report that he is, after all, free and asks for Fran's hand in marriage, she's already fallen in love with Chuck, securing the classic happy ending. Snappy dance numbers, stellar singing, and period humor made "Promises, Promises," a joy to watch. Incidentally, it also inspired me to commit to buying a fedora I'd been eying in JCPenney. (Chuck sports one despite his worry that it makes him look like James Cagney. His was gray; mine is pink and black.)

As a side note, it occurred to me that the movie The Baxter was probably based on Chuck Baxter's character. The Baxter is about Elliot Sherman (Michael Showalter), a guy who lets people walk all over him. Indeed, the name Baxter becomes synonymous with anyone who's a malleable yes man, establishing the theme of the movie. Elliot's fiancé (Elizabeth Banks) is cheating on him with her high school boyfriend, and he's powerless to stop her. Meanwhile, he becomes friendly with his offbeat temp secretary (Michelle Williams), who is enmeshed in a relationship with a Baxter of her own (the inimitable and always-easy-on-the-eyes Paul Rudd). In the end, Elliot gets jilted at the alter when the high school boyfriend busts in. Elliot ends up with the secretary, who has overthrown her own boyfriend for being too "Baxterish." Poor Paul Rudd ends up with no one. Although it's a little more complicated than The Apartment and "Promises, Promises," the parallels between C. C. Baxter and Elliot are definitely there.

Now that the deepness is over and done with, it's time to share an interesting tidbit I learned after reading the "Promises, Promises" playbill. It turns out that Sean Hayes (of Will and Grace fame) is the executive producer of that new TV Land sitcom Hot in Cleveland co-starring Betty White. Small world, huh?