Luke is
seen without full profile until near the end of what is, from what I could
count, a five minute tracking shot. Not
since The Wrestler have we seen such a sustained hand-held-from-behind shot
where we follow a man into an arena of physicality as in The Place in the Pines
where Luke (Ryan Gosling) is at an amusement park, lifts a couple of weights to
get pumped up, and walks over to his tent where he gets on to a motorcycle,
then inside of a small dome with a few other riders, and proceeds to do stunt
riding all inside of the dome. It ends,
he gets out, and the movie goes on.
This sets
up the character so well without saying anything, but director Derek Cianfrance
then takes things to the next, personal level with this character. He has a fling with a local girl, Romina (Eva
Mendes), then leaves and comes back a year later to say hi. Turns out she had a baby – his – and now he
feels a great level of responsibility.
Trouble is, she doesn’t really want anything to do with him – that is,
as a father. She feels attraction
towards him (what rational-thinking woman wouldn’t want to be with Gosling
after all), but he isn’t entirely a trust-worthy person on the front of fatherhood. Not to mention she has met another man in
this interim time, and now Luke is in a bind: how to provide for this baby,
when he no longer works at the amusement park.
Robbing banks could do the trick, says Luke’s friend Jack (Craig Van
Hook, a terrifically sleazy screen presence, at least as this character).
These bank
robberies lead Luke into a world of trouble and, in fact, death at the hands of
a beat cop in Synecdoche, Avery (Bradley Cooper), in the midst of a
shoot-out. From here the film gets into
a part two, where it goes from being a very richly told though still pulpy tale
of a bank robbing metal-head stunt-cyclist trying to get back with his woman,
to a cop drama involving an injured cop, off-the-books bank-robbed cash and
crooked cops. This part of the film, which also
features Ray Liotta as one such cop, works as well as it can, and benefits from
Cianfrance’s direction which, as in Blue Valentine, allows for raw,
naturalistic performances to uplift the more genre-trope elements. Cooper is also very good in this role, a
decent guy with a baby at home (same age as Luke’s baby) who doesn’t want to be
a hero cop really, especially this way, and is much too smart as a
once-potential lawyer to go into the crooked part of the police
department. Much better to take the
whole bloody lot of them down and become DA instead.
And then
something surprising happens yet again in The Place Beyond the Pines, just when
I thought the film might (almost) be near its finish: it gets into what, as
Cianfrance has said in interviews, the film may be really ‘about’, as it goes
ahead fifteen years of time, and now little AJ (Avery’s kid) and little Jason
(Luke and Romina’s) are now teenagers, and as (bad) luck would have it wind up
at the same high school as Avery runs for attorney general of the state. The bad luck is, well, AJ is a little s***,
into lots of drugs and partying and being an a-hole, while Jason, not an
innocent, is just a kid without his father.
How will this all come into play...
I describe
so much here because there is a lot of story in The Place Beyond the Pines, and in an odd way it’s a little like a Pulp Fiction narrative which is most
surprising of all considering how much Cianfrance, once a documentarian (as was
his co-writer Ben Coccio), takes such crime-drama elements so straight-on,
brushing away artifice as much as he can.
It’s three stories in one story spread across generations, and yet I
still remember most fondly and would love to revisit over and over the Gosling
storyline with Luke. Here Gosling really
shines like I haven’t seen him quite before – rather, the best parts about his
character in Drive (also a
stunt-driver and professional criminal, and with a moody, James Dean but
*better* sort of quiet quality), and in Blue
Valentine (a rough guy but with a good conscience and big heart), and he’s
just impossible to take your eyes off him here.
He’s so good that he makes Eva Mendes, usually just okay in her roles,
rise up to what he’s doing which is just intimate, intense acting with
characters we want to care about. So
that by the time Luke is robbing those banks, we’re on the edge of our seats as
this guy is just going too far, but we know exactly why.
As
mentioned, Cooper is good as well, and can hold your attention in a role where,
like Luke, Avery has to navigate the simple task of ‘what is right thing to
do?’ Though a small gripe I couldn’t let
go in his segment as the young hero cop was the casting of Ray Liotta. It’s not that he is bad in the film, nor does
he blow any new ground either. Perhaps I
have just seen him play too many hot-headed (corrupt) cops, that it felt like
not miscasting but type-casting.
These first
two acts or movements are so strong dramatically that the third act, for me,
suffered due to less Cooper and more of these teenagers. Dane DeHaan plays Jason best as he can, as a
confused, angry but intelligent young man, but the casting and writing of Emory
Cohen as AJ is the film’s biggest flaw: after so many characters in the film
that feel whole and three-dimensional, be they male or female (Rose Byrne has a
good small role as Cooper’s wife by the way), this kid just comes off as a
little druggie brat without a shred of sympathy much less believability. So that when the main conflict comes to a
head it’s hard not to guess how things will go down between these two sons of,
I suppose, fate of some sort.
And yet The Place Beyond the Pines is a small
gem of filmmaking because of how much Cianfrance trusts in his two leads, and
in his skills with DP Sean Bobbitt of stripping down things to their dramatic
meat and bones. There’s no flash,
there’s no super-stylized dialog (albeit there is wit, such as Luke’s friend
and bank-robbing accmplice’s remark “Not since Hall & Oates has there been
such a team”), it’s just the big, sorta epic story of these fathers and sons
torn asunder by crimes, punishment, and duties towards their families and each
other. For its missteps in casting or
writing, it’s the strengths in Gosling, his most affecting work to date, and another
career notch for Cooper and Mendes, plus the naturalistic atmosphere (first the
mid 1980’s, then present day Synecdoche, New York) that elevates this, at its
best, to grand tragedy.
