The trailer to The Place Beyond the Pines sells the movie as an indie drama, and you think the movie is exactly that, until you get through about the first third of it. Then you realize the movie has much bigger aspirations. Directed by Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine), the movie takes unexpected turns as it attempts to address ambitious themes of fate, family, and the legacy of sin passed down from father to son, but its sprawling story takes too many jarring turns to make it a true masterpiece.
Director Derek Cianfrance calls the movie a “triptych” because it has three wings, one about Luke (played by Ryan Gosling), a poor ne’er do well who turns to crime to support his family, one about Avery (played by Bradley Cooper), a heroic cop pitted against Luke’s crookery, and a final one about the nexus of families and revenge that unfolds around the two of them.
Luke starts out as a motorcycle rider in a traveling circus in Schenectady, New York, and Cianfrance’s camera follows Luke from behind in the movie’s opening shot. Luke remains faceless until he dons his red leather jacket, mounts his motorcycle, and rides perfect rings in a small steel cage with other stunt drivers. That is the depiction of Luke’s personality- he doesn’t say much, he follows what he is told to do and lives in the present (a lot like Gosling’s character in Drive, actually, both of whom have only short patches of dialogue as compared with other major characters).
After the show Luke meets Romina (played by Eva Mendes), an old flame of his, and finds out, surprise! that he has a baby son. Suddenly he’s robbing banks to support his family, with the help of a small time crook named Robin, (the excellent Ben Mendelsohn). The two men live alone in a secluded trailer in the woods, which allows the cinematographer an excuse to shoot sweeping panoramas of scenery in the lush dark forestry. The name “Place Beyond the Pines,” according to Wikipedia, is a loose translation of the Indian name “Schenectady,” and the natural landscapes around this upstate New York town gives the movie some of the epic sweep it craves. Wrapped around the impressive cinematography is Mike Patton’s evocative score, (think Radiohead mixed with Beethoven), which lends the movie the haunting, atmospheric tones of a pinewood forest. In some choice, innovative shots, the confident artistry of the camera work similarly fulfills the movie’s high artistic aspirations.
Story-wise, however, the movie doesn’t satisfy its sweep, as it twists to accommodate multiple plotlines. In the second segment, Avery, a small town cop hero who is responsible for bringing Luke down, has a set of his own demons to face, as he conflicts with his wife (Rose Byrne), his corrupt cop friend (Ray Liotta) and his father, a successful judge whose public service career Avery hopes to mirror. The movie’s third segment then moves ahead fifteen years, when Luke and Avery’s children (Emory Cohen and Dane DeHaan) are grown high-schoolers who become unlikely friends. I say unlikely because the characters themselves are drawn unrealistically (Avery’s son AJ speaks like a Long Island gangster who could never have been born to his parents) and because the chances of them accidentally becoming friends as they do in the movie are exceedingly unlikely.
You can see that the movie quickly becomes muddled and unwieldy, with Cianfrance unsuccessfully milking drama out of a movie painted with too thin brushes on too wide a canvas. It seems the movie’s overarching significance makes it disregard the minutiae that are the hallmark of true drama. It’s a shame, because the movie has such potential, and it’s often genuinely gripping, but there are too many scenes that confound, too many motives that are undeveloped. Cianfrance might do better if he gets a screenwriter with a more acute ear for drama to pen his next project, because his screenplay, which jumps from character to character and flaw to flaw, bars him from using his directorial showmanship for dramatic depth.
It’s often the nature of good films to be polarizing, which is to also to say that Place Beyond the Pines may be considered one of the year’s best films even if many critics may note how flawed it is. It’s easy to forgive the movie’s mis-steps as a consequence of the larger-than-life scope of the movie. It tries to chart the ineffable, to provide a narrative that spans many years, relationships, and people, and if it falls short at times, it is to be commended for trying.