n Derek Cianfrance’s 2010 love-on-the-rocks heartbreaker Ryan Gosling plays a husband and father, Dean, who appears to be nothing but an annoyance to his wife, Michelle Williams’ Cindy, a harried nurse. She hustles to get their young daughter out the door to school, even as Dean, relishing the role of the fun dad, turns breakfast into a game. “Let’s eat like leopards!” he suggests, dotting the kitchen table with raisins plucked from his daughter’s oatmeal bowl, which the two lap up with jungle-animal gusto. In a flashback we see a younger Dean who, in his job as a mover, has been charged with unpacking the belongings of a frail, elderly man who’s just been consigned to a nursing home. He removes plates, pictures, knickknacks from their wrapping with casual tenderness, aware that each item bears the fingerprints of a life. Plenty of gifted
