By Pamela Zoslov
The surprise of Derek Cianfrance's
second feature, The Place Beyond the Pines,
is that it is three films in one. The first section of the triptych,
shot in the moody, azure-tinted
style of Blue Valentine,
centers on Luke (Ryan Gosling), a drifter and stunt motorcyclist who
adopts a life of crime to support his baby son. The second, shot in a
more traditional style, is a police drama focusing on Avery (Bradley
Cooper), a rookie patrolman who has a fateful encounter with Luke.
The third, and least successful section, set 15 years later, focuses
on the now adolescent sons of the criminal and the cop. Cianfrance,
who also co-write the script, has attempted a multi-generational
saga, with linked sections reminiscent of Stephen Soderbergh's
Traffic (or, less
flatteringly, the Wachowskis' Cloud Atlas).
Ambitious in its sweep and running just under two and a half hours,
the film promises greater significance than it delivers. But it is
not without stylistic flair and thematic interest.
In the
first section, Gosling is a laconic antihero, a man with no
background, copious tattoos and cigarette perpetually dangling from
his lips. Cianfrance, who also directed Gosling in Blue
Valentine , is evidently enamored
of Gosling's bleached-blond outlaw image, framing him against a
blurred night background of carnival neon. Luke, a stunt cyclist of
legendary reputation, is performing in a carnival in upstate New York,
where a beautiful ex-girlfriend, Romina (Eva Mendes) approaches him.
Luke visits Romina's house and learns,from her mom that he is the father of Romina's baby son.
Father-son relationships are a central theme of the film; one of the
few things we
learn about Luke is that his old man wasn't there for him (there's an
original theme), so he wants to be there for his kid. Toward that
end, he lets a low-life pal talk him into a new career: robbing
banks.
Luke
ignores his
friend's advice to commit the robberies without violence. Instead, he
robs banks maniacally, like Batman's Joker, wearing a Darth
Vader helmet and leaping atop the tellers' windows, shouting and
threatening employees and customers before making a fast motorcycle
getaway. Not
surprisingly, his criminal career hits a dead end, happy news for the
viewer weary of Sean Bobbitt's mannered cinematography, the
heavy, ominous score,
and dialogue mixed too low to be intelligible. The poignancy of
Luke's fate is muted by the fact that apart from his love for his newly
discovered son, Luke is kind of a dick.
In
section two, not only is the dialogue more audible, the story is also
more interesting. Patrolman Avery is a law-school educated cop, new on
the
beat, who ends Luke's crime spree in the line of duty. Hailed as a
hero, Avery has lingering guilt feelings about Luke's year-old
son, the same age as his own boy. The father-son issue folds in as
Avery, who has political ambitions, tries to
live up to the expectations of his dad, a retired judge. A straight
arrow with a conscience and a Medal of Freedom, Avery becomes privy to
police corruption and
makes dangerous enemies on the force (one of them played with suitable
scariness by Ray
Liotta). Shedding the first section's mannered, mumblecore style, Cianfrance
displays a sure hand with the police thriller genre; too bad the
entire film isn't as solid as this section. Part three introduces
Avery's son AJ (Emory Cohen) as Avery is campaigning for state attorney
general. The kid is a muttering suburban “wigga” whose chief interests are getting high and
scoring Ecstasy and Oxy. He preys on classmate Jason (the excellent
Dane DeHaan), son of hapless "Moto Bandit" Luke. Would-be thug AJ
enlists innocent
Jason in his criminal adventures, setting in motion a chain of
retributive violence.
The
tripartate film doesn't quite cohere, but it does contain strong
scenes. It also enables comparisons between Gosling and Cooper, two
popular,
good-looking leading men, In this cage match,
Cooper is the victor. He continues to demonstrate impressive range
and sensitivity, and in emotional scenes, he's the cinema's best crier
since
another Cooper, the famous 1930s child actor Jackie Cooper.
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