Harvey Weinstein isn't going to let Blue Valentine premiere with an NC-17 rating without a fight.
The co-head of the Weinstein Company says he's appealing the MPAA's rating of the Ryan Gosling-Michelle Williams drama about a married couple whose relationship deteriorates.
Though he has no intention of recutting writer-director Derek Cianfrance's film, Weinstein says the NC-17 rating will hurt the movie's shot at awards and box office draw.
“We’re going to have to overturn this,” he says. “This is serious stuff. This could really hurt the movie . . . Derek doesn’t want to [recut] it, I don’t think there’s any reason to do it, and of course I’m worried that if we don’t get the R it could jeopardize the business of the movie and more importantly my actors . . . because they are eminently nominatable.”
Weinstein believes the movie got the NC-17 rating for one scene in which Gosling's character performs oral sex on Williams'. “That was good acting,” he says. “Maybe too good.”
Still, he questions how the MPAA came to its decision.
"It feels a bit arbitrary to me, as far as the rationale given and ratings other things get," Gosling said at a Hollywood screening of the film on Sunday. "They gave it not because of something they saw, but because of the way something in the film made them feel. That speaks to the power of this film. There's no real scene that they can hang this X rating on . . . It's just an emotional reaction."
Williams, meanwhile, expects the film to have a lasting effect regardless of the rating.
"I’m happy for it to stay just like it is. Genuinely, I am" she told EW.com." Movies get to have long lives and it’ll be judged and rejudged in 10 or 20 or 30 years, and I’ll be curious to see how it stands. It seems like such a condemnation. It feels like such a slap on the hand, like you’ve been a bad kid or something."
Weinstein is still scratching his head about the rating, however, especially based on MPAA's past decisions.
“How did Piranha 3D get an R and Blue Valentine gets an NC-17?” he says, citing the August horror film released by the Weinstein Company’s Dimension label. “If [Piranha 3D] got an NC-17, I’d be the first going, ‘All right, we gotta cut some of that stuff.’ It’s ridiculous — a penis got coughed up in the movie by a piranha! They show more in four scenes [in that movie] than we do in [all of Blue Valentine]! And ours is a serious love story. I don’t understand it.”
Expect Blue Valentine in theatres December 31 -- regardless of rating.