Blue Valentine

When my son saw that I had watched this on PPV, he groaned, "Oh Mom, you've got to stop watching movies like this!" Yes, it is a movie about the dissolution of a marriage (a particular hot button of mine), but more than that, it is a view of a particular blue collar dead end life that somehow contributes to the end of the relationship as much as do its inherent problems--one-sided love, thwarted ambition, anger issues, unresolved jealousy.
Michelle Williams plays a woman who is born to be used by men, to be attracted to those with that proclivity. To her earnest, uncomprehending husband she feels little love and much resentment. Circumstances have conspired to keep her from what she thinks she wants, but she has been a willing co-conspirator in the downward spiral of her existence. She does not, however, have the insight to realize this.
When her work life and her home life and perhaps her dream life all come tumbling down at once, she is ill-equipped to understand why, and so opts to end her marriage as some kind of proactive response to the chaos.
Everyone here has no anchor, no stability, even of the mental or spritual variety. These are lives lived wholly without examination. And let me say that perhaps there is no ability to examine or critically evaluate. Ryan Gosling plays the husband with just the right degree of hapless ignorance and nervous striving. We know, as we watch the trickling down of their lives, that everything will go downhill from here.
We can see the future--her dates with men who will use her, her gradual fade into hardness and bitterness; his aimless drift from job to job, fighting when he can't deal with his fate; the child's (the child!) unmoored life mourning her once-upon-a-time little family, prey to the same yearning for love that seized her mother. It is a sad, but terribly truthful, tale.
The loss and eventual death of the dog in the first scene is a metaphor for this marriage. Bad things happen to unattended beings.