(USA, 140 min.)
Dir. Derek Cianfrance, Writ. Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio,
Darius Marder.
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, Ben
Mendelsohn, Ray Liotta, Rose Byrne, Bruce Greenwood, Emory Cohen, Dane DeHaan.
"Yet you ask, ‘Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?’ Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live. The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them."
-Ezekiel 18:19-20
Derek Cianfrance gets biblical in his disappointing third
feature The Place Beyond the Pines.
After the bare bones heartache of Blue Valentine, Cianfrance delivers an ambitious, if bloated, epic saga of moral
consequences. It’s a story of the bond between fathers and sons, and the guilt
that is carried from one generation to another when the sins of the father
haunt the son.
Luke’s story is the first of three acts in Pines’ sprawling drama. The first hour
of Pines is an exhilarating crime
drama, which revs like Luke’s motorcycle from the film’s very first long take.
(A stunning shot by DP Sean Bobbitt.) Luke finds himself leading a string of
bank robberies to provide for his son, but each time he gives more, one senses
that something equal is being taken away.
The second father in Pines
is Avery Cross, a police officer played by Bradley Cooper (Silver Linings Playbook). Like Luke, Avery has a one-year old son,
but his bond to his son is tested when he takes the life of another boy’s
father in the line of duty. Avery and Luke’s legacies as fathers collide in a
jarring act of fate, which forever connects their family histories and passes
on Shakespearean-level burdens to their sons.
Cooper gives a strong performance as Avery grapples with the
guilt of shattering another family. Avery’s story, however, isn’t quite as
involving as Luke’s is, and the second act of The Place Beyond the Pines feels redundant as the fathers and sons
reflect upon their actions. Pines
offers a roster of unlikeable, self-serving characters, too, aside from
Mendes’s sympathetic Romena, so the morality play of the family drama
culminates in a muted emotional payoff as characters get their just desserts.
The power of The Place
Beyond the Pines, though, mostly dwindles thanks to its weak final act that
depicts the sons of Luke and Avery bearing the weight of their fathers’
actions. Each act in The Place Beyond the
Pines is progressively weaker than the one that precedes it and the
downward arc of the film stresses its overlength. The finale suffers the most,
however, because the younger actors don’t offer the same dramatic skills as
their father figures do. (Although Cooper as some fine moments towards the
end.) Pines can’t shake the
convolution of its mystery, either, and the threads get tangled in a knot as
they weave together.
It’s mostly an actors’ showpiece for Gosling and Cooper, as
Cianfrance offers much of the compelling character-driven spark of Blue Valentine. The transition away from
the sparse mumblecory-ness of Valentine
doesn’t feel as much like a step up, though, as Pines is an uneven grab bag of cinematic flourishes, with bizarre,
disorienting canted shots and sequences with a high-frame rate feeling oddly
out of place between the handsome long takes and crane shots of the
countryside.
The setting of the film—a small town named Schenectady—is
appropriately atmospheric. The Place
Beyond the Pines seems to play out in a timeless place. Schenectady feels
like the quintessential small American town, a place where family matters and
where community exists. It’s a fitting site to lay bare the epic consequences
of Pines’ familial fable. By the time
one sees the forests for the trees, though, Pines
has long overstayed its welcome. The
Place Beyond the Pines might be overwrought and overdrawn, but the scale of
the storytelling as impressive as it is exhausting.
Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
The Place Beyond the Pines is currently playing in theatres.
*Photos courtesy eOne Films
