The Place Beyond the Pines

Any time a movie has the audacity to span generations, I get a bit nervous. I did not going in that this movie was going to be so expansive in its scope of time.. The trailers made me think it was going to be a fairly intimate cops and robbers drama with some family dynamics thrown in. I was wrong. Instead, The Place Beyond the Pines is a grand sprawling drama about fathers and sons and how the actions of men can determine the lives of their sons. It is an ambitious undertaking and director/writer Derek Cianfrance has certainly assembled two great Oscar nominated leading men to help him try and focus this drama. Those two leading men, Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper, share only one scene together, but they are as vital to the movie as any leading men.

Luke (Gosling) is a motorcyclist. That is his life. He is the daredevil of a traveling carnival and he is the key draw. Looking like Gosling would certainly help draw people in. When he arrives back in Schenectady, New York he is met by a woman, Romina(Eva Mendes) with whom he once shared a brief but passionate affair. He gives her a ride home and wonders i there could be more there, but she already has a man. Luke shows up to her house before he leaves town and Romina's mother answers the door with a little boy who turns out to be Luke's kid. Luke does not want to be a deadbeat like his own father, so he tries to figure out how to provide for his kid. He meets a man who used to rob banks and this man convince Luke it is easy to rob a bank and soon the two start robbing banks and Luke is able to throw some money at Romina and his kid, but Romina and her new man, are not too terribly keen on it. After a violent confrontation with Romina's new man, Luke realizes he might not be that good of a guy and he wants to leave, but first he wants to leave Romina with enough money to raise the boy. He decides he wants to rob multiple banks in one day, causing his partner to pull out. Luke goes ahead with his plan, but does not realize that his first bank is not a great bank to try and rob. The plan backfires and he finds himself in a chase with the cops. He eludes a few on his motorcycle and is soon being chased by officer Avery Cross (Cooper). After he crashes his motorcycle, he leads Cross on a foot chase. After their one scene together, the entire movie shifts gears and Cross becomes the focus. Labeled a hero for what he did, the wounded cop is forced to a crossroads, and realizes he is not meant for field duty. Cross is the son of a very prominent judge and Cross himself graduated law school and decided he wants to be a cop much to the dismay of his family. Cross gets mixed up with some dirty cops and eventually decides he has to blow the whole thing wide open and use it to his advantage to move up the ranks. His ambition, that he swore he did not really have comes to front as he exposes the entire dirty cop ring. From there, the film shifts focus again, jumping 15 years into the future and dealing with the children of Luke and Avery.

The ambition of the sprawling family drama is admirable. The shifting focus is also admirable and it honestly works better than I expected it to when I realized what was happening. The tone of the film manages to stay very solid even as the film violently shifts focus the first time and then again when it jumps in time and completely changes the kind of film it is. If there is one thing that really nagged at me when the film was over, it was the cleanliness with which it wrapped up. This film felt like it deserved a messier or more ambiguous ending. That is not to say the story wraps up in a bow, but I felt there was too much closure for this kind of film. The film came full circle, almost in a "well duh" kind of way and none of the movie up tot hat point had really followed in that fashion. There are other issues as well, but that was the one I was left with when all was said and done. Cianfrance does a great job of setting his story up and he really drives the themes home without being overtly obvious until the very end.

I was impressed by Gosling and Cooper, but that is not surprising. I have been fans of both men for a long time and in a review of Yes Man many years ago, I wondered why Cooper was not a huge star, and now he is. However, he is proving he is more than just a gorgeous face. His acting breakout in last years The Silver Lining Playbook has opened up a whole new avenue for him and I hope he continues to travel down it and give layered interesting and introspective performances like this one in this film. He ends up carrying a majority of the film, even though he is a supporting character in the third act. He has the most to do in terms of heavy lifting in the acting department. With Luke, Gosling incites the action and he is, of course, great in his minimal approach to acting. The opening scene finds us following the back of Gosling's head in a single take shot through the carnival and it is only when he gets ready to put his motorcycle helmet on that they reveal that pretty face of his. Gosling always fully commits to roles, but here, he goes through a total transformation, from the dozens of character tattoos (including a face tattoo) to the ridiculous clothing, Gosling embodies a man desperate for something bigger, something better. He wants to give his kid what he never had, and when he understands the kid might be better off without him, he tells Romina to not tell their kid the truth about him. That moment sets up the entire third act of the film.

Cianfrance has a great eye for visuals, as the film looks great. He captures the "pines" gorgeously and even though the opening one take shot does not mean anything thematically, it is a great way to grab us from the first moment. He handles the focus shift in an engaging way, which makes sense since he is working from his own shift. However, the most impressive thing about The Place Beyond the Pines is the sound. This might seem like such a small thing in a film, but here it looms large. There is a sequence in the second act where Cross is being led to a secluded spot by one of the crooked cops and the sound design in that moment alone is breathtaking. The screen is almost fuzzy as we hear Cross start to panic as he follows this dirty cop. The less in focus the screen becomes the more prominent the sound of Cross breathing becomes. Soon as he can focus on his how heavy and panicked his breathing has gotten. It is nearly suffocating for us as we beg him to turn around, or roll down a window, or something, anything to make the panic stop. It is claustrophobic in a very real way.

I found the themes of fathers and sons very well done, even to the point where we do not know much about how Cross was raised, but we understand in his two scenes with his father, why he turned out the way he did. Of course, that sets off a chain reaction to how cross treats his son. Cross did not want to be like his father, so he became a cop, and ended up a politician, just like his father. In turn, Cross' kid, AJ(Emory Cohen) is a punk. He talks with an awful Jersey Shore type accent and lingo. He actually seems to embody the Jersey Shore lifestyle. He is looking for drugs when he meets Jason (Dane DeHaan). They form a tumultuous friendship that spirals into craziness because of the secrets of their fathers. Jasons never knew his father and that turned him into an introvert, and a kid who questions everything. He goes searching for the truth about his father and that leads him down a path similar to his father when the film fades to black. Cianfrance is curious about the repercussions our actions have even fifteen years down the road. In order to do that, he has to create a whole world before even getting to the big key of the film. It mostly works, but you have to be willing to go with it.

Final Grade: B