The Place Beyond the Pines
(2012)
(SPOILERS) There’s something daringly perverse about the
attempt to weave a serious-minded, generation-spanning saga from the
hare-brained premise of The Place Beyond
the Pines. When he learns he is a daddy, a fairground stunt biker turns
bank robber in order to provide for his family. It’s the kind of “only-in-Hollywood”
fantasy premise you might expect from a system that unleashed Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man and
Point Break on the world.
But this is an indie-minded movie from the director of the acclaimed
Blue Valentine; it demands respect
and earnest appraisal. Unfortunately it never recovers from the abject
silliness of the set-up. The picture is littered with piecemeal characters and
scenarios. There’s a hope that maybe the big themes will even out the rocky
terrain but in the end it’s because of this overreaching ambition that the film
ends up so undernourished.
The inspiration for the movie ought to have dampened
expectations. Director Derek Cianfrance, who teamed with Ryan Gosling on Valentine, took his cue from Gosling’s
reported wish to rob a bank (as something in life he hadn’t done but wanted to
do; this from one of the most feted actors of his generation). Gosling
proceeded to explain how he’d go about it (so he’d obviously given the matter
some thought) and his plan is what you end up seeing.
Which might have been well and good if Gosling had proposed
the idea to another of his collaborators, Nicolas Winding Refn. After all, Drive turned on a not so dissimilar premise;
Hollywood stuntman moonlights as a getaway driver (do we sense a running theme
of muscle-brained machismo in Gosling’s choices?)
But Refn’s movie is consciously mythic and stylistically
extravagant. You couldn’t mistake it for complex, except in a textural sense.
That’s part of its pleasure. Cianfrance has stylish visuals on his side (courtesy
of Steve McQueen’s regular cinematographer Sean Bobbit; his Valentine DP Andrij Parekh turned the
project down after a premonitory dream in which he died during the opening
fairground stunt sequence). And there is a haunting, evocative score from Mike
Patton. But the production values are leagues ahead of the screenplay (by the
director with Ben Coccio and Darius Marder).
What impact it has comes from its structure., I’d expected
this to be a Gosling movie with Bradley Cooper in a supporting turn, but in the
tradition of Psycho it takes some
surprising detours. Cooper’s cop (Avery Cross) doesn’t actually show up until
the end of the first act when he puts an end to Gosling’s robbery spree. It
couldn’t happen a moment too soon, as I was wondering how I’d endure a
140-minute movie all about dim-watt sociopath Luke Glanton. This isn’t a
character you can feel for, or who betrays any insights. He’s a caricature, as
exterior as his blonde rinse and ridiculous tattoos, and any empathy we might
have is forfeited long before we witness his explosive violence.
Cianfrance ensures that the heists themselves are enervating;
there is a real sense of danger and immediacy to the chases. But they can’t
make up for the deficiencies in the plot. Eva Mendes (as the mother of
Glanton’s child) and Mahershala Ali (as her other half; Ali has recently been
seen to scheming effect in House of Cards)
are sympathetic in the face of Luke’s primal cartoon force, but the scenario is
never for a moment believable. This another vehicle for Gosling to pose as an
earthy, blue-collar type (even with the ludicrous character notes), to banish
the ghost of The Mickey Mouse Club
and show us how much he is informed by all those gritty, provocative ‘70s
movies that stars made back then. Except that this time he’s shot him in the
foot. His efforts prove faintly ridiculous, all posturing and no content.
Glanton is as empty as Gosling’s thousand-yard stare. Cianfrance might argue
that the point is that Glanton is completely lacking in self-awareness, but he
omits to present a good reason for us to be involved with his story or an effective bridge between his
elaborate criminality and the theme he wishes to explore. He’s using Timmy
Mallet’s hammer to crack a nut.
The title of the movie sounds like something David Lynch
might come up with, and Cianfrance frequently manufactures a dreamlike ambience
that wouldn’t seem out of place in Lynch’s fare. But it feels like an
inappropriate choice, foisted on subject matter that ultimately reveals itself to
be so lacking in substance. He sets out to tackle an inter-generational theme
(the sins of the father, and the need for forgiveness), but the canvas is too
broad for him to pay any aspect of it justice. If the first sequence lacks
credibility, the second is humdrum and over-familiar. Perhaps if Cianfrance had
come up with something really
Lynchian (Glanton and Cross are the same
person!) it might have redeemed the stodgy aspects and rendered the dish
more palatable.
Cooper is nearly as unbelievable playing a cop as Gosling is
as a macho stunt rider. You’re never in any doubt that this is just an actor larking
about at cops and politicians. The tentative attempts to explore the undeserved
heroic status foisted in Cross, and his resultant guilt, have potential. But Cianfrance
squanders this with ham-fisted exposition (Cross goes to see the police shrink
who works out in seconds that he has problems being around his infant son because
of his guilt over leaving Glanton’s son fatherless; her deductive powers are
astounding!) It also quickly becomes obvious that the director has nowhere to
take Mendes’ character for the rest of the story. She’s purely reactive, there
to illustrate the parallels and differences between the two men who mess up her
life (Cianfrance makes this particularly plain in scenes where each attempts to
force her to take a gift as she escapes into the safety of her car).
The police corruption plotline isn’t just sub-The Shield, it makes the so-so cop
dramas of James Gray and Gavin O’Connor look profound and insightful. A raft of
great actors pop up for a few scenes (Rose Byrne, Bruce Greenwood, Ray Liotta)
and there are good ideas sprinkled in, but none of it really hangs together.
Maybe Cianfrance could have done his ideas justice with a mini-series (although
that stunt riding bank robber shit would never fly), but the second act in
particular suffers from rushing over the ground it needs to cover to reach the
third.
Because, despite the focus being away from the star leads,
the final act is where Cianfrance actually gets a grip on the story he wants to
tell. The first two were needed to realise the third, but they weren’t the
point. That doesn’t mean he is able to carry off the
essential-interconnectedness-of-things contrivance by which the paths of the
sons of Glanton (Dane DeHaan as Jason) and Cross (Emory Cohen as AJ) entwine.
Cianfrance is pushing for the gravitas of grand Shakespearean tragedy and, if
these two were star-crossed lovers rather than friends-come-enemies (albeit,
there is a hint of homoerotic subtext at times, as there is between Luke and
Ben Mendelsohn’s Robin in the first act), he might have succeeded. But he can’t
disguise the wheels of convenience dictating the plot. DeHaan and Cohen are
very good, although I haven’t seen the latter before to judge if his range. The
character of AJ seems to suggest the idea that you’re better off not knowing
your natural father than having one who neglects you, in which case you’ll most
likely turn out to be a right little shit. DeHaan brings a commanding intensity
to all his roles, and occasionally puts me in mind of a young Brad Dourif.
Cianfrance does little to sell the 15-year leap in terms of
the holdover actors. Jason’s visit to Robin is well done though, and there is a
strong flavour of the way memory adjusts the past to his reminiscences (that,
and his need to avoid telling Jason the unvarnished truth). Bradley has slicked
back his hair and donned a suit, but we only believe he’s the District Attorney
because we are told it is so. Nevertheless, the scene where he confronts his
son in the police cell, instructing him to stay away from Jason is powerful (“You leave that kid alone!”), and has a depth
to it missing elsewhere. Cianfrance attempts to explore the idea of the
inability to escape one’s past, but he ends up dealing with it rather crudely.
Jason forces Cross to drive to the Miller’s
Crossing-esque titular locale, the same spot where Ray Liotta was set to
whack him over a decade earlier. There’s a sense that he should have died then,
and that he has been a walking dead man ever since; it is only when he issues a
heartfelt admission of sorrow for what he did that he finds peace. It’s a
strong scene, and well-played, but it acts as a climax to a much better movie
than the one the preceding two hours gave us.
I’ve yet to be convinced by Cianfrance. He’s a talented
director, but his writing is neither as profound nor resonant as he clearly thinks it
is. The intimacy of the performances in Blue
Valentine (and, as here, the camerawork) papered over many of the
deficiencies in the storytelling. He’s also clearly fascinated by the device of
ellipses; there he used it reasonably well, but here the conceit has caught up
with him. He may need to set his sights a little lower next time. Or better
still, work from someone else’s script.
**1/2