Blue Valentine (2010) on Netflix
Dean Pereira paints houses and Cindy Heller Pereira works as a nurse. Dean insists on a night at a motel, and the story moves between their marriage and how they met.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.3/10228,457 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes87%
Trailer
Plot summary
Cindy Heller Pereira is a nurse at a clinic, and her boss, Dr. Feinberg, offers her a place at a new clinic in another city, asking whether she has talked about moving with her family. She has not. Her husband, Dean Pereira, paints the interiors of houses and drinks beer while he drives. They are raising their daughter, Frankie. Cindy is scheduled to be on call the next day, but Dean presses for a night at a motel two hours away, and they leave Frankie with Cindy's father. Earlier scenes show Dean, who dropped out of high school, working for a moving company in Brooklyn while Cindy studies pre-med and cares for her grandmother, and he first sees her on a delivery to a nursing home.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Blue Valentine (2010)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Before Ryan Gosling was cast as Dean in Blue Valentine, the role was offered to Channing Tatum, who turned it down, a decision he later said he regretted.
- Because Michelle Williams's partner Heath Ledger had died the previous year, she wanted to shoot close to her Brooklyn home so she could care for their daughter Matilda, so director Derek Cianfrance chose Honesdale, Pennsylvania for its proximity to Brooklyn.
- To prepare for the scenes showing Dean and Cindy's marriage falling apart, Gosling and Williams rented an actual home, moved in their own belongings, shopped for groceries on a budget matching their characters' incomes, filmed home movies, sat for a family portrait at a local Sears with the child actress, and staged out arguments together.
- To build tension between the leads while staying in character, Cianfrance had Gosling go into Williams's bedroom one night and try to make love to her; Gosling was rejected and ended up sleeping on the couch.
- Blue Valentine was shot on two different film stocks to separate its timelines: Super 16mm for the couple's early courtship scenes and the digital Red One camera for the later scenes of their marriage falling apart.
- "You and Me," used in the film as the couple's personal song, began life as an obscure early-1970s demo by a group called Penny & The Quarters for a small Columbus, Ohio label, and was only rediscovered when The Numero Group reissued it on a 2007 compilation without ever identifying the group's members.
- The MPAA gave Blue Valentine an NC-17 rating over a scene depicting cunnilingus, prompting Ryan Gosling to publicly accuse the ratings board of sexism and misogyny for treating a scene of a woman receiving oral sex more harshly than similar scenes involving men.
