The Place Beyond the Pines (15)
dir: Derek Cianfrance
The phrase “Always leave ’em wanting more” was probably not foremost in the mind of the director Derek Cianfrance when he elected to open his latest film with a close-up of the bare torso of his star, Ryan Gosling. (For some viewers, this will be like receiving dessert before dinner.)
Even in the internet age, where it can seem that every bit-part actor is an icon, there is a frisson surrounding Gosling, the like of which has not been seen since those photos of Keanu Reeves looking sad while eating a sandwich. Gosling fills our need for an actor who is simultaneously pretty, intelligent and sorrowful but who has yet to throw in his lot with the blockbuster: a grass-roots idol. He is rather indulged in The Place Beyond the Pines by a director with whom he has become transparently comfortable. (They worked together on Cianfrance’s last film, Blue Valentine, a gruelling story of marital breakdown.) Gosling’s performance is characterised by feigned inarticulacy and mumbling method madness. His co-star Bradley Cooper, who has not previously shown an aptitude for the subtle or the intense, has the comfortable monopoly here on great acting.
Gosling plays Luke, a fairground stunt rider who is first shown in an unbroken tracking shot striding from his trailer to the marquee where he will join two other motorcyclists zooming around inside a giant steel globe. His natural habitat is the open road: in sympathy with him, the film’s recurring motif is a driving shot that floats a metre or two higher than the vehicle it’s following, suggesting surveillance but also transcendence. Luke walks out of his carnival job and pitches up unannounced at the home of his old flame, Romina (Eva Mendes). Her mother answers the door with a tot in her arms. “Who’s this guy?” sniffs Luke. Not being the sort to beat around the bush, the woman blurts out: “He’s yours.” More than two hours later, most of us will wish she had been placed in charge of the editing.
Romina is understandably reluctant to let Luke back in her life. He is unemployed, has a trashy dye-job and displays his personality in his tattoos. Perhaps it’s wrong to judge a man by his bodily ink: the grenade on Luke’s arm and the knife dripping blood beneath his right eye could very well conceal a talent for macramé, or an abiding love for the films of Joyce Grenfell.
It just happens that he has a nasty temper and a shaky moral compass. He puts out a rival’s eye and turns energetically to crime to support his son. Luke is essentially a brute but there’s rather too much editorialising about him in the script. A scene in which he poses for a photograph with Romina and the baby, telling the waitress who is snapping them to “just capture the mood”, is amusing but out of character; it’s funny without feeling remotely true. It’s as though everyone involved, including Gosling, were worried Luke would come across as a dumb lug. There are actors who can play the dope without tipping a wink to the audience, but Gosling isn’t one of them. There is too much self-awareness in his eyes: the lights are off but there’s still somebody home.
One of the more interesting elements of Blue Valentine was its non-chronological narrative, and Cianfrance has again approached structure in a novel fashion. To say more would spoil some of the film’s disorienting surprises. But as other plotlines impinge on Luke’s story – including a rookie cop, Avery Cross (Cooper), who contemplates blowing the whistle on police corruption – the film grows in stature, assuming tragic dimensions. Cooper’s scenes bring dramatic freshness to a fairly standard cop-movie dilemma. With his soft, square head and hounded eyes, he exhibits levels of fragility that make Montgomery Clift seem like an uncouth longshoreman.
The Place Beyond the Pines has so much ambition that it’s disappointing its sweeping vision of a world governed by guilt and revenge doesn’t extend to women – particularly when you recall the banquet of a part that Cianfrance wrote for Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine. While the men in the film run around injuring one another and gnashing their teeth, female characters such as Romina or Avery’s wife, Jennifer (Rose Byrne), are shunted off screen; presumably they are knitting or skipping through copses until the next time they are required to keep a vigil at the bedside of a male relative. The mythically tinged final scene brings events full circle in a way that is superficially satisfying while also conceding that the movie’s chief concern is men and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
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