The Place Beyond the Pines

The Place Beyond the Pines

From the moment the film starts I am pleased. We're at a traveling circus and we're following right behind Luke (Ryan Gosling) as he's walking through the grounds to the tent in which he's simultaneously being presented. Here he tosses his smoke, gets on his bike and accelerates off into the perfect visual metaphor which the globe of death is, in which he makes his living as a stunt driver. On the carnival grounds we feel the stickiness of candy floss and we smell the burnt popcorn as he post-show is confronted with an old flame; Romina (Eva Mendes). Not many words are exchanged, but oh, don't we feel the gazes between them holler out for the past? 

This is a difficult movie to review without spoiling it, and therefore I have to be as wordless and yet as descriptive as our two former lovers. One thing I might as well reveal straight off; I enjoyed this film and did not, in spite of its length (almost 2,5 hours), check my watch even once. I tend to have the attention span of a golden retriever, only if there are treats or cuddles awaiting me will I dedicate myself for such a wealth of time, but for this I remained calmly in place.

The film very clearly functions as a play in three acts, each focusing on its own main character, ensemble like. Luke and Romina have had a brief, but seemingly passionate affair last time the circus was in town, for as we learn a baby boy is now the result. Luke (always wears t-shirts inside out, overly tattooed) sees the boy and quits his job on the spot to stay behind and provide for his new family. But he's an outsider to society and the only way he's successful in raising money is by robbing banks which is going pretty well due to his…. stunt driving capabilities. Yes. Ding-ding-ding, the bells are ringing; and if you saw Drive from 2011 you know what bells I'm talking about. I'm still impressed by Drive, sadly most by its enthralling aesthetics and score, and not so much by the underdeveloped characters. Here Gosling also plays a mythical, mystical stunt driver who acts as a getaway driver for hire for bank robbers. This particular character is apparently on stock in Gosling and although I couldn't think of anyone else to portray Luke, I had the feeling that Gosling is slightly overcast and doesn't do enough to shake off Drive. Gosling does what he's good at, and what producers and directors hire him for, he delivers great close ups of his puppy-dog-macho face which most of the films he's in takes consistently advantage of. It's fair play, but I miss seeing more. (As a matter of fact, Gosling recently announced his retirement from acting which disappoints me as I have a feeling we haven't seen all he's got yet.) 

After a series of good runs things turn sour for Luke however, and in steps Avery (Bradley Cooper), and idealistic lawyer turned street cop who's now on the hunt for Gosling. But life is hard on a good man like Avery, probably harder than it is on most, because he suddenly finds himself in a hornet's nest of corruption at his workplace. Avery represents the discrepancy between theory, the law, and practice, the police force in which he's working his way up, and the film largely operates from within this vacuum between the two, refreshingly without much judgement or presupposition. And this is the greatest virtue of The Place Beyond the Pines, which it unfortunately lets increasingly go off as the film moves into its 3rd act which is the most troubled of them all (for good reasons that I won't mention here out of respect for those who like surprises.)

In a peculiar way this film is at the same time completely clear in its agenda, it is also elusive and vague. There is an obvious and weighty thematic of father-son-relationships that remains somewhat floating, there is the thematic of human morale which is similarly afloat but to my great joy. This leads me to my ultimate problem with The Place Beyond the Pines; it is a difficult excersise for a piece of fiction to not pass judgement on morale, and although it does in glimpses, it remains surprisingly free of it. But there's a fine line between letting a motion picture speak for itself and washing it out in oblivion. 

The Place Beyond the Pines is tilting towards washing itself out for me as I ultimately left the cinema with an unsettling feeling that director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine) wanted more to make a great film than a great film with a voice. The fact that Cianfrance recently made the plunge into directing cinematic film from having established an entire career on making TV documentaries ("Black and White: A Portrait of Sean Combs" from 2006; the title alone describes the issues of The Place Beyond the Pines pretty well), and we're still seeing remnants of his inner documentarist. Although the documentary genre, when well done, possesses some of the same qualites as cinematic works of fiction, they too have to balance fine lines. I would claim that whereas great documentaries (and I didn't see Cianfrance's Sean Combs portrait, no.) utilize storytelling as a technique to bring alive and appropriately dramatize a story that the director is cutting like a diamond (preexisting before his interest, latently waiting), cinematic film needs another level of nourishment to come alive and stand out, and Cianfrance doesn't deliver enough. Perhaps this will be his trademark, but he clearly has his stories to tell, and I think I'd like to see more of those.