“Biggest Disappointment”

BLUE VALENTINE is a searing look at the rise and fall of a short-lived marriage, and although it has received a lot of praise for its excellence, it just might be a big disappointment to you.

Ryan Gosling plays Dean, and Michelle Williams plays Cindy, and we watch them in scenes of their present-day marriage, as well as scenes of when they first met and fell in love about six years earlier, but in distracting jump cuts back and forth instead of in chronological order.

In fact, this film looks as if the filmmakers finished making the film chronologically and then decided that it was so bad that in order to make it more interesting, they reedited it and rearranged all the scenes to be out of chronological order.

Unfortunately, that only made it worse.

The film begins in the present, Dean and Cindy have a little five-year-old daughter named Frankie, and a family crisis occurs when their dog runs away.

Dean tells Frankie that maybe the dog moved out to Hollywood to become a movie dog, and then they take Frankie to stay with Cindy’s parents for a reason that we don’t know until later.

Then we get a time switch to six years earlier and see Dean working for a moving company and moving an old man named Walter out of his apartment and into an assisted-living home.

Back in the present, Dean tells Cindy, “We’ve got to get out of this house.”

This is the reason they took Frankie to Cindy’s parents, and they book a night in the Future Room of a theme motel, where they have a night of drinking and sexual carousing.

And then it is back and forth to their meeting, falling in love, a nasty encounter with Cindy’s old boyfriend, having dinner at the home of Cindy’s parents, as well as what happens to them after their night in the Future Room.

In the present, Dean is a free-lance painter, a job he admits that he likes because he can start drinking at 8 o’clock. In other words, Dean doesn’t have any big ambitions.

Cindy, on the other hand, works as a nurse and wants to become a doctor.

BLUE VALENTINE is a film I was looking forward to, but so far it is the biggest disappointment of the year.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”