By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.2 cats
Director: Derek Cianfrance
Starring: Ben Mendelsohn | Bradley Cooper | Bruce Greenwood | Eva Mendes | Ray Liotta | Rose Byrne | Ryan Gosling
Country: united_states
Year: 2013
Running time: 140
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1817273/combined
Bruce says: “Some films focus on the inner selves of the characters; others focus more on the relationship of the characters to society as a whole. THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES, certainly one of America’s finest films of this millennium, looks at the big picture without making its characters seem small or incomplete. Derek Cianfrance (BLUE VALENTINE) is making his mark with films about mid-America. These are not films about the rich and glamorous; they are films about lower and middle class struggles and dreams that are often misplaced, lost or simply out of reach.
“One of the unique features of THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES is its L’AVVENTURA structure, that of having sequential stories with the focus on different characters. At the beginning THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES is the story of Luke (Ryan Gosling), a motorcycle stuntman who works carnivals. While at a carnival stopover in upstate New York he discovers a son he didn’t know he has. He quits his job and becomes fixated on fatherhood, never mind that his son’s mother has made another life for herself and does not want to jeopardize her security. Not quite halfway through, the film switches to the story of Avery (Bradley Cooper) an idealistic, college educated, rookie cop who accidentally crosses paths with Luke. Finally in a bold, one- upmanship maneuver the film shifts again, this time to the story of their sons Jason (Dane DeHaan) and Benny (Ephraim Benton) who become friends when Benny moves back to live with his father who is now running for Attorney General and heading for Albany.
“This is the real America, the new racial mix – where a child has a white father, a Hispanic mother and an African-American stepfather and that mix is not central to the film’s plot. It is also an America where almost everyone has an angle on how to bypass the system to get what he or she wants – an America of eroded morality. It’s an America where peer pressure trumps personal conscience. It’s an America with few joyous moments.
“The actors are uniformly superb. Ryan Gosling’s blank stare perfectly conveys Luke’s limited intelligence and he layers, on top of that, macho behavior and a bizarrely believable, out-of-place sensitivity. Bradley Cooper also shines as a young man with ideals who mistakenly views himself as incorruptible. Dane DeHaan is one of the young actors to watch; Jason has to be a breakout role for him. 5 cats”
Chris says: “Some of the negative criticism heaped upon Derek Cianfrance’s film disparages it for being too ambitious. In an era where one can’t help but notice the utter lack of ambition and innovation in most commercial art house cinema, this complaint lazily comes off as nitpicking or frustration with the film’s unconventional structure, or perhaps just a visceral reaction to a 140-minute running time that doesn’t exactly breeze by.
“Although not flawless, THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES gets considerable momentum from its ambition. Rather than heralding it as the future of cinema, one could more wisely view it as an old-fashioned urban epic of the vintage Scorsese/Coppola/Cimino variety, albeit one with three distinct movements. The first (and best) revolves around Luke (Ryan Gosling), a motorcycle stuntman who performs in a traveling carnival. On his latest round in Schenectady, he discovers he has an infant son as the result of a dalliance with Romina (Eva Mendes) during his last time in town. Moved by this revelation, he quits the carnival and sticks around to be a father to his child (even though Romina’s already selected another live-in boyfriend for this role). Work’s not easy to come by, so Luke soon turns to robbing banks with the help of off-the-grid mechanic Robin (Ben Mendelsohn, terrifically rickety). Hair bleached blond, body covered in cheap tattoos and only slightly more loquacious than his enigmatic character in DRIVE, Gosling is effortlessly intriguing—an entire feature centered on Luke could have made for something like a gentler, less nihilistic TAXI DRIVER.
“However, in the film’s second movement, the focus shifts away from Luke and entirely onto Avery (Bradley Cooper), a young cop who first appears chasing after Luke following a botched bank job. Avery initially registers as the anti-Luke in terms of class (his dad’s an influential lawyer), and social status–he works on the right side of the law and has a wife and infant son he has no difficulty supporting. As with the disintegrating affair depicted in Cianfrance’s previous feature BLUE VALENTINE, not everything here is that black-and-white. Avery’s faced with a slew of ethical quandaries, both in relation to his own performance and his workplace. Although earnest in its attempt, this second movement doesn’t sustain the first’s energy and dark allure. Good as he is, Cooper just can’t match Gosling’s presence and magnetism. A lengthy tangent involving police department corruption (featuring a suitably slimy Ray Liotta) could have made for an interesting film on its own; to me, it felt like unnecessary padding.
“Still, don’t write off the film just yet, for the third movement provides a much-needed jolt. Set 15 years later and centered on Luke’s and Avery’s now teenaged sons, it successfully ties together the legacies between the two generations and how each father’s fate is reflected in his son’s future. Again, it’s not as compelling as the earlier scenes with Gosling, although Dane DeHaan is excellent as Luke’s bottled-up son. Sure, Cianfrance could stand to edit a little more and not be so damn serious all the time, but he does expertly juggle his multiple narrative strands so that the ending achieves sufficient closure. THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES isn’t as great as it could have been, but it shows that Cianfrance has the potential (and certainly the ambition) to one day make the cinematic equivalent of the Great American Novel. 4 cats”
Thom says: “I do feel awkward writing this review due to the surfeit of positive reviews that I’ve read from so many sources but I was eventually let down by the experience. While I think the device of having two different protagonists occupying each half of a film (the first time I ever saw it was in Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic L’AVVENTURA) this time the thread was too thin. Luke (a superb Ryan Gosling) is a daredevil motorcycle hotshot who switches professions to bank robber when he falls in love with married small-town waitress Romina (gorgeous Eva Mendes, Gosling’s current flame, by-the-by). When he finds out Romina is pregnant with his child he decides to give up his stunt riding days and settle down in Romina’s area, you know, the place beyond the pines. Nonetheless to earn money to support his son, with no real chance of ever winning over Romina he turns to holding up banks. Halfway through the film Luke exits the story and the principal character shifts to a new policeman who has been tracking Luke, Avery Cross. Avery, who already has a law degree, is a very ambitious cop. When he discovers corruption in his police department he sees as a way to move up the ranks by exposing his workmates. The tenuous link is exacerbated by the more procedural second half And then, jumping 15 years in time to precariously bring together Avery & Link’s teenage sons seemed hokey to me. I added points to the film for being 140 minutes long which passed in what I thought was half the time. I’m not all that taken with Cooper but there were some strong scores by Rose Byrne as Cooper’s slatternly wife and Mahershala Ali (good career move by Ali shortening his name from Mahershalalhashbaz from his ‘THE 4400′ days) as Mendes’ flustered husband. All in all, a decent effort but I preferred BLUE VALENTINE. 3.5 cats”