If director Derek Cianfrance has any sort of specialty, his most recent film, Blue Valentine, hints that it’s probably putting characters in awkward situations, making the viewer squirm as they have to live in them as well, and then making the whole painful package go down smoothly by jazzing it up with pretty photography and music. It’s a formula that works, that makes a filmgoer feel like they’ve been through an experience and got their money’s worth, so his latest film, The Place Beyond the Pines, largely sticks to it. The focus here gets expanded beyond just a relationship gone bad though. This is a film that’s actually fairly epic in scope, in that it features quite a few characters and is told from several different perspectives.
Actually, that’s an important aspect of this film that needs to be made clear up front. The advertisements made it look like a caper flick where a motorcycle riding stuntman played by Ryan Gosling robs banks and a fresh faced cop played by Bradley Cooper tries to stop him, but that’s not quite what it ends up being, and some of the people in the theater I saw it with were audibly frustrated at the bait and switch. What we get is actually a film that’s split up into three very distinct acts that are loosely connected through a handful of shared characters. The first third of the film, that’s the one where Gosling is robbing banks to convince Eva Mendes’ character that he can support the baby they’ve had together. The second act is Cooper’s show, and mostly involves him dealing with a mistake he makes in the line of duty. The third act takes place 15 years in the future, and is probably the place where most people are going to find themselves thrown.
If you know what to expect and allow Pines to take you where it will, you’ll find that the writing is actually quite good. In addition to being connected through shared characters, the three distinct acts are also connected in that they’re heavily steeped in noir tropes, so fans of that genre should find a lot to like. The story deals in moral compromise, and follows the traditional noir logic that once a character becomes compromised, it’s only a matter of time before his whole life becomes a downward spiral. Over and over again characters are given choices to make, and when they choose the easy path they find that there are consequences to face. Pines also wrestles with thematics regarding fathers and sons, and how much of a connection exists between them. Can we ever truly be our own people when we come from someone else? This isn’t just a movie about bank heists, it also gives you a healthy dose of existentialism to chew on.
The script does have its problems though. There are a few too many conveniences in the plot where people and actions get connected merely for thematic reasons, so eventually you have to start taking the story as a fable rather than as a realist series of events. And while ditching the protagonist of the film twice in order to put the focus on someone else is a ballsy move that The Place Beyond the Pines generally pulls off, it does make the mistake of front-loading all of its best stuff in the first act. You just can’t top Gosling dressed up like a filthy carny robbing banks on a motorcycle, so it’s hard not to view the rest of the film as something of a letdown. The second two acts are still entertaining filmmaking, and criticizing a movie because part of it is completely awesome seems counterintuitive, but pacing does count for something.
Of the two truly standout scenes, one of them does come in the portion that focuses on Cooper’s character though. The first is a chase sequence in which the cops finally close in on Gosling during a robbery. It’s got a found footage aesthetic where the automotive portion appears to be shot from a police camera, and the on-foot portion in handheld. Usually this effect is jarring and hard to follow, but here it’s pulled off to perfection and used to put you right in the middle of the action. The scene is reminiscent of the amazing foot chase Kathryn Bigelow directed in Point Break. The second standout scene comes when Cooper and a crew of dirty cops led by Ray Liotta unlawfully search a house in order to steal some cash. They’re in someone’s home, putting their hands on their children and rifling through their personal belongings, and the situation creates such a visceral emotional response in you that you want to reach into the screen and strangle them. It’s classic Derek Cianfrance awkwardness.
The performances here are generally good. Gosling is Gosling, so you know what to expect from him. He always dives into his performances head first, always commits fully to making extreme choices, and he’s predictably hypnotic as this unique and driven criminal with a heart of gold character. Mendes is strong too. She probably gets the most emoting to do, and she’s always authentic and always able to engage your sympathies. Cooper is serviceable, but he doesn’t do the standout work that he did in something like The Silver Linings Playbook. His cop character is a blank page really, the kind of guy who’s constantly trying to hold his emotions in, so other than a spotlight scene or two all he’s really doing is keeping a straight face. If there’s any standout performance, it would be the one that Ben Mendelsohn gives as Gosling’s partner in crime. He’s on fire in this movie. His performances tend to go big, and they can sometimes look out of place and showy depending on the film, but next to Gosling’s over the top approach to everything he’s a perfect fit. This movie should serve to get him a million more jobs.
The Place Beyond the Pines is bound to be the divisive sort of movie that starts a lot of arguments, so it’s hard to confidently recommend to people. I really liked it, but I’ve already seen that there’s a group of film fans out there who are going to react to it very negatively. Let’s put it this way though—would you rather watch a movie that’s ambitious in what it tries to accomplish and fails in a few places or a movie that plays it extremely conservatively and manages not to take any missteps? Which is more interesting? It’s true that The Place Beyond the Pines overreaches a bit, but it reaches far enough and gets close enough to its goal that I would still consider it a success. At the very least you should give it a watch and decide how you feel about it for yourself.
