Blue Valentine DVD box set

"Blue Valentine" DVD box set is a movie that ruefully reminds you of what it's like to fall in and out of love. We meet Dean (Ryan Gosling), a house painter and morning drinker, and his wife, a nurse named Cindy (Michelle Williams) as their relationship is unraveling; the end seems near.

Here is a film that watches pretty well itself. Derek Cianfrance, the film's writer and director, observes with great exactitude the birth and decay of a relationship. Toward the end of the six years, when Cindy is hardly able to remember why she wanted to marry Dean, Cianfrance observes the physical and mental exhaustion that has overcome her. And the way that Dean seems hardly to care — just so long as Cindy remains his wife and his watcher, which in his mind was the deal. Dean thinks marriage is the station. Cindy thought it was the train.

All marriages have milestone moments, events of startling clarity that allow the new lovers to see themselves as a couple who have been defined. Dean is capable of grand goofy romanticism, and Cindy likes that. She yearns toward it. They first meet at her grandmother's retirement home. Have you ever had one of those chance meetings with a stranger in a place neither one of you belongs? Did a space empty of your lives so that you start new with your first conversation and plunge straight ahead into a suddenly new future?

"Blue Valentine" DVD box set moves between past and present as if trying to remember what went wrong. From Dean's point of view, maybe nothing did. He wanted to be married to Cindy, and he still does and he still is. Cindy can't stand that. He never signed off on the growing old along with me part. He doesn't think the best is yet to be. He thinks it's just fine now.

"Blue Valentine" strives to paint that shadow of loneliness and fear which drives many to marriage – only to find them more lonely and afraid than ever.