The Place Beyond the Pines

Like father, like son

In Blue valentine, Derek Cianfrance brought us a very small and personal film about the breakdown of a relationship. The narrative followed a married couple Dean Pereira (Ryan Gosling) and Cynthia "Cindy" Heller (Michelle Williams), shifting back and forth in time, between the dissolution of their marriage juxtaposed with the happier early days of their relationship.  Derek Cianfrance’s follow-up feature is much bigger, more ambitious, and consequently slightly more faulty a film. Despite this, it proves to be a thrilling, deeply intense psychodrama about fathers, sons and the legacy of sins that are passed down through the generations.

The film is split into a trifecta of stories, each of which focus on different protagonists; Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), a tough tattooed felon struggling to be a good father,  Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), a cop striving to be ethical amid a corrupted precinct and Jason (Dane DeHaan), a fatherless teenage boy searching for the truth of his childhood. A real drama with meat on its bones, The Place Beyond the Pines is a splendidly acted, intensely gripping drama rife with daddy issues.

We open on Luke Glanton, a luxuriantly tattooed motorcycle stunt rider preparing for a show with a traveling circus. On that same night he rendezvous with a girl he met on his last trip through, Romina (Eva Mendes), and soon finds out she is carrying his child. As a means to an end, Glanton turns to a life of crime and undergoes a spiel of bank robberies to provide money for his family. To reveal anymore would be to spoil the twists and turns of the movie, which makes up for a majority of the fun.

After the small scaled intimate Blue valentine, Cianfrance has put everything into his sophomore effort, deciding to up the ante with a narrative that spans space and time, cramming bank robberies, police inquires and teenage parties into one sitting. Although flawed, the film secures Cianfrance as one of the most exciting new directors to watch. His style of filmmaking is raw and organic; the camera lurks in the background like a fly on the wall capturing intense drama that feels heavily improvised. He is capable of directing tremendous performances from actors and almost expertly intertwines three films into one. There is a Greek tragedy element at play here that pervades the stories, as we move from one to the next, each character’s fatal choices causing consequences that reverberate down generations.

It must be mentioned that the film is not without faults, a real sin being the baffling casting choice of Emory Cohen as Bradley Cooper's son, who doesn’t resemble his actor parents in the slightest. It’s not so much a misstep as it is a complete miscast.

The Place Beyond the Pines follows a trajectory that becomes more and more obvious as these stories unravel. The plot looses steam and a real sense of plausibility, stumbling into a less intense, not-so-quite adequate climax. In its third act, Cianfrance's composition is unable to deliver the same electric edge-of-your-seat energy. Maybe its because we can see them from a mile away, but even the final revelatory moments in the third act can’t revitalise the same sense of drama that made the previous two acts so exhilarating to behold.

Despite the thorny major theme of fate being hard to swallow, The Place Beyond the Pines gets almost everything else right. The epic scope of the script could have been difficult to fully comprehend but it translates beautifully on screen and is boosted by an ominous soundtrack and mercurial cinematography. Major credit here goes to the two leads Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper, whose gutsy performances make for a solid and compelling must-see.