What is love? The Notebook vs. Blue Valentine

Ryan Gosling called Blue Valentine a good companion to the Notebook. I don’t know if he was kidding or not, but I decided to take Mr. Gosling at his word and give this movie an honest look.

To say these movies go well together would be like saying David Duke goes well with Louis Farakahn. They’re miles apart in every respect – writing, acting, direction, tone... They are, however, flipsides of the same coin. Both are love stories that end tragically, yet they couldn’t be more different in how those respective tragedies come about if they tried. 

Based on the Nicholas Sparks’ book, the Notebook begins in an old-folks’ home with James Garner reading to Alzheimer’s patient Gena Rowlands. He tells her the story of two young lovers who meet in the 1940s, played by Gosling and Rachel McAdams. She's from a family of blue bloods; he's from a working-class one. They meet in some ridiculous fashion, with him climbing her Ferris wheel and threatening to jump off unless she goes on a date with him. She agrees and their courtship begins, ends, and begins again. 

We realize midway that Rowlands and Garner are the characters in the story he's telling, a way for her to remember their love together. The movie is filled with scenes of purely sentimental crap, like where Rowlands briefly recognizes Garner and says “do you think our love can create miracles?” That and Gosling and McAdams canoeing through a lake of ducks. It’s enough to gag on.

The Notebook unconvincingly tries to show us people falling in love through a montage of Gosling/McAdams at various states of play. The moments they do spend talking are merely to advance the plot, and bring us no real understanding of why they actually care about each other. After they break up, she becomes engaged to a wealthy WWII veteran (the chronically-cuckoled James Marsden) who is virtually the same character as Gosling but with more money. What personality trait separates these two is never shown, so it’s completely incomprehensible for McAdams to leave Marsden for Gosling except for lazy writing perhaps. 

Blue Valentine has a similar, love-at-first-sight moment between Dean (Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams), but their scenes are poignant, well-written, and more importantly, real. What’s brilliant about this film is through its clever narrative structure, we see the circumstances that not only lead them to get together, but what inevitably breaks them apart in the end. 

In one flashback sequence, Dean talks casually to a co-worker about what men look for in a relationship compared to what women look for. The gist of what he’s saying is very simple: he believes in love at first sight. Meet a girl, fall in love, get married, have kids, the end. Forget having a steady career, or better yet, one that’s about something. But six years into his marriage, he’s basically coasting. He’s let himself go. He drinks all day. He paints people’s houses for a living. He reminded me of the Good Will Hunting scene where Matt Damon tries to justify his construction job by saying there’s honour in what he does, completely denying his genius because he’s afraid. I wouldn’t say Dean is afraid to realize his potential. It’s questionable if he has any, but he’s happy with his life with Cindy and their six-year-old daughter. 

She on the other hand is coming from a very different place. Prior to meeting Dean, she had just broken up with her jerk boyfriend. She was at a crossroads and needed direction. She didn’t want to end up in a loveless marriage like her parents, but she’s also susceptible to the same stupid idea Dean is: love at first sight. But she’s not as naïve as Dean is. At first she is, due to the situation she finds herself in after meeting Dean, but six years later she's lost sight of what she fell in love with about him in the first place, and this leads to the marriage falling apart. She’s carrying him and he could give a shit about doing anything with his life. Their break-up is one of the hardest I've ever seen. 

Every moment between Dean and Cindy in Blue Valentine, both happy and sad, add up to way more than the entire two hours the Notebook spent trying to convince us its characters loved each other. Because relationships are hard, and so is love. Anthony Lane put It best when he said hurt is the bedfellow of love, and what Blue Valentine showed more than anything else is just how painful that shit can be. 

I think when Gosling called the Notebook a good companion to Blue Valentine, he was inviting people who watched the Notebook and took it seriously to watch a film that was a more honest, real portrait of a relationship. That movie arguably made Gosling the celebrity he is today, and ironically, it’s probably the only way he would have been cast in Blue Valentine.