Distant Relatives: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Blue Valentine
Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 11:00AM Robert here with my series Distant Relatives, which explores the connections between one classic and one contemporary film.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Blue Valentine explore the same territory but come at it from entirely different angles. Woolf is deliberately theatrical, full of delightfully big performances, long monologues, and crescendoing clashes. Everything that's wrong with George and Martha's relationship gets said and said again. Blue Valentine is insistently realistic, filled with small moments and quiet regrets. All that's wrong with Dean and Cindy's relationship is encompassed by things gone unsaid. Ultimately though, both are marriages on the brink of collapse, a subject covered many times since the invention of film, or the narrative story itself. What makes Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Blue Valentine interesting companion pieces is that both juxtapose a middle-aged couple with a young couple.
A Tale of Four Couples
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, introduces us to the middle-aged collegiate couple George and Martha (Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, of course) as they're introducing themselves to a younger couple Nick and Honey (George Segal, Sandy Dennis). Nick is a new teacher at the school, filled with ambition. George is not. Honey is a fragile little thing. Martha is not. Over the course of one night filled with lots of booze and BS, both relationship, but particularly George and Martha's, for that's the important one, will be bent to their breaking point. The middle-aged couple in Blue Valentine are Dean and Cindy (Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams). Dean is a bit of a layabout and treats life as if it were as easy as he wishes it were. This leaves the majority of the work to fall to Cindy who can't really find the time in her schedule for anything resembling fun and at this point has pretty much given up on wanting to. And the young couple in Blue Valentine are the same Dean and Cindy, at the beginning of their life together, filled with love and optimism. It's not a "feel-good picture."
This isn't to say that the young Dean and Cindy are directly equatable to Nick and Honey or that the older Dean and Cindy are the same as George and Martha... (more after the jump)
Nor is it to say that Nick and Honey represent a younger George and Martha, a gimmick utilized to varying degrees of success by any wide number of dramas. But the fact that the young and old couple in one of our films are different people and in the other are not and the fact that in both films the couples are intimately contrasted through either the magic of editing or the fact of just being in a big damn cluttered room together, leads us to the clear understanding of where they're all headed, which is roughly the same place. And how they're getting there is the same too, a mess of failed ambitions, confused parentage and an emotional unreality where no one is filled with as much reactionary hate toward each other as they think but peace is just no longer an option.
Stay Together for the Kids
"That was what was supposed to happen!" Elizabeth Taylor's Martha says as she describes the failed plans of her husband George who works in the History department, as opposed to being the History department. So now she's not wife to the College President, she's the wife of a washed up man. So she fills her time with drinking and shouting, so it went in New England academia in the sixties. Since Cindy lives in this decade, she has to fill her time working, and hard. But when she asks Dean if he want's to do anything, be anything, make anything of himself, you can't help but notice those same faded ambitions. They may not have even been there to begin with. Then there's the children. In the world of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, in the shadow of the nineteen fifties, with it's nuclear family based faux-perfect culture, the presence or absence of children went a long way to defining the success of your marriage. When the outcome involving your little one's isn't exactly what you hoped, resentment builds. In the thoroughly modern marriage of Blue Valentine's Dean and Cindy, their relationship may not be defined by children, but the complication is still there. Dean acts more like his daughter's playmate than her parent, with good reason. He joins the cast of the other film in wondering if the world see any posterity of his once he's gone. But generationally speaking, dysfunction doesn't just go in one direction. The parents of Dean and Cindy and George and Martha loom large over the preceedings leaving their psychological scars. Even in middle age, there's no escape.
With the George, Martha, Dean Cindy cogs clearly in place, this leaves us wondering how closely the youngsters of Blue Valentine resemble Nick and Honey. If we see an similarity it's in the signs that the young lovers aren't as perfect as they first appear. In terms of motivation to marry, love and affection can mask convenience, but they can't usurp it. There's plenty of imperfection in the young couples of both films. They just don't see it yet. But it's important to note that in all these cases, George and Martha, Dean and Cindy, Nick and Honey, these people do love each other. If they didn't, their collapse wouldn't be nearly so painful to watch. They hurt each other in ways based in that love. And it's far worse than if it were based in hate. Ultimately the films leave us in places of ambiguity, but not sadness. Though they end not with optimism but with relief. There is a sense that maybe these couples have made it through their darkest, and whether or not they've survived in tact, at least the worst is over... or maybe not.
Other Cinematic Relatives: Sunrise (1927), Faces (1968), Scenes From a Marraige (1973), American Beauty (1999), Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Reader Comments (7)
Wow, great piece. When I read both titles you were focusing in I didn't make a connection straightaway, but there are lots of parallels you explored really well. Will Blue Valentine beat the test of time and become one of the classics of today? Although it wasn't as Oscar-successfull as Woolf, it did resonate and stayed with audiences.
Right. Makes sense. I do see one huge difference in the content of these movies. In the stage play of WAoVW? there's a pretty clear indication that George is gay, and this is connected to the great secret of their childlessness. I always thought the lack of direct focus on the homosexuality of George in the film had to do with the same kind of cultural mores that kept, say, Paul Newman's character's sexuality in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof ambiguously defined. I guess I see the connections between Blue Valentine and Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, and I think an argument could be made that each movie examines and critiques gender roles within a marriage. For me, though, Albee's story is a critique of something having to do with the self-hatred of certain types of gay men. Which makes it a very different story. Both are super moving films; I guess Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf just moves me in a different way.
I've mentioned that Withnail and I and The Red Shoes would be interesting as a comparison. (Even if that would be a tough article because it's dealing with the representation of a whole orientation.) I already mentioned a weird, and likely hard (but probably significantly easier then the first mentioned suggestion) suggestion in The General and Edward Scissorhands.
I originally thought of a Distant Relatives between Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf and Carnage.
Some reviewers compared Blue Valentine to Last Tango in Paris. Michelle WIlliams was good in the film, but Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf's acting showcase is still much more impressive.
Soccer games: The Republic of Montenegro VS England
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