THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES (Three Stars)

U.S.: Derek Cianfrance 2012

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILER ALERTS AND MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS.

ACT I. The Place

The Place Beyond the Pines. Nice title. Pretty good crime movie.  Wish it had been better. Anyaway, it‘s the Iroquois Indian phrase for Schenectady. And Schenectady, New York is where this pumped-and-running, madly ambitious Derek Cianfrance neo-noir, about father and sons, motorcycles and bank robberies and tragic destiny takes place — and where the movie was actually shot, super-documentary style, by director/co-writer Cianfrance (Blue Valentine) and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (Hunger and Shame).

The show has a lot going for it. The story, about the collision between an outlaw and a cop, and its aftermath, is often riveting. The cast, an unusually good one, is topped by critics’ pet Ryan Gosling (as Luke, a carnival motorcyclist turned bank robber) and new-guy-in-town Bradley Cooper (as Avery, the cop who shoots Luke in a chase), with  distaff contributions  from Eva Mendes (as Romina, Luke’s ex-lover and the mother of his one-year-old boy) and Rose Byrne (as Jennifer, Avery’s wife and the mother of his one-year-old boy).

It’s mostly extremely well-acted, especially by Gosling and Cooper, and by Ray Liotta as a crooked cop named DeLuca  and by Ben Mendelsohn as a wonderfully sleazy and screwed up auto mechanic named Robin, the guy who introduces Luke to a life of crime. (Shouldn’t Mendelsohn and Sam Rockwell do a  brother act some time?)

Did I say The Place Beyond the Pines was ambitious? The movie, which is nearly two-and-a-half hours long and divided into three acts set fifteen years apart, was inspired, Cianfrance says, by the triptychs in Abel Gance’s 1927 silent grand-operatic bio-drama Napoleon — though why a three act drama  would be inspired by Gance’s three-paneled, wide screen effects, isn’t clear. (Maybe Cianfrance and Bobbitt should have revived the split-screen effects of  Napoleon, The Thomas Crown Affair or The Boston Strangler.) The script also shows traces of Jack London, whose fiction, like “The Call of the Wild“ Cianfrance says he devoured during the film’s preparation — and also probably by Bruce Springsteen. Mendelsohn has the Springsteenesque line, “If you ride like lightning, you’re gonna crash like thunder.” Amazingly he brings it off.

Besides showcasing Pines’ high ambitions, some of which are realized, it’s a terrific-looking film. The star cast looks great, of course, and Cianfrance and Bobbitt shot the movie in a kind of coldly sunny blur of metallic speed and near-constant movement that starts out with a five-minute-long tracking shot, the camera  held behind Luke’s head,  and follows him all the way into the motorcycle cage (or “Globe of Death”) where he plies his trade. At first.

ACT II. Beyond

The movie that follows that opening takes place very neatly — almost too neatly — in three acts.  Act One shows Luke at his tawdry show biz pinnacle and then shoves him off it, bringing on Romina, with whom Luke had a one night-or-so stand and who now is bringing up his child — with another guy (Mahershala Ali as Kofi), as it happens. When Romina catches Luke’s attention after the act, she asks him almost plaintively if he remembers her name. (He does.) Then, with Luke now filled with a new sense of fatherhood as carnival barker Billy Bigelow was when he sang The Soliloquy in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel” (one of my favorite musicals and musical numbers by the way), Luke decides to man up and be a dad.

SPOILER ALERT (roll over to read)

He  quits his carny job, gets hired as  a mechanic by Robin, is as much of a natural as armed robbery at armed robbery as he is at bike-riding (a skill-set he felicitously combines), and gets killed when Avery chases him after a last, reckless robbery. This act or section is the best part of the movie, though it wouldn’t have worked to cut the story off here.

Act Two switches the focus over to Avery, an ambitious young cop who’s the son of a judge (Harris Yulin). Clean-cut, brainy, and highly motivated, Avery has his eyes on politics, but he’s so wired up tight during the chase, he shoots and kills Luke. Torn with guilt at leaving Luke’s boy fatherless, he’s also in a ticklish situation in the department. A bunch of the guys try to help him out by shaking down Romina and Kofi for the bank robbery money Luke gave her — but Avery decides to turn them all in. This section, which suggests a Sidney Lumet cop corruption drama like Serpico or Prince of the City, is almost as good as the first act, a movie which in turn suggests Gosling‘s earlier crime movie/neo-noir Driver.

Then comes Act Three,  fifteen years later.  Avery, who made it District Attorney,  is running for state Attorney General, and his son (Emory Cohen as A.J.) and Luke‘s son (Dane Dehaan as Jason) meet at school, and bond over drugs. Things get darker. Politics proves just s rough and devious a game as armed robbery or off-color police work, and the two kids neatly — too neatly– fulfill their fates. Like father, like son — maybe.

ACT III. The Pines

The Place Beyond the Pines, unlike most big-star Hollywood vehicles, is something the people involved obviously cared about, that they wanted to be great. Cianfrance and his fellow writers, Ben Coccio and Darius Marder, reportedly wrote thirty or more drafts of this script — and then allowed the actors to improvise, and the Schenectady townspeople (who served as extras) to veto scenes they thought were spurious. I applaud the scriptwriters  for their perfectionism (and their openness to suggestion). But  in all those thirty drafts, they still never solved the third act.

If The Place Beyond the Pines were going to be a great film — and it had a chance — then the strongest part of the movie, or at  least as strong as the other two,  would have to be the Third Act, with its confrontation between the two families and between the sons of Luke and Avery. Unfortunately — and a lot of  critics seem to be in agreement on this — the third act of The Place Beyond the Pines is by far the weakest, partly because Cooper is around less, and Gosling isn’t around at all, and Cohen and Dehaan aren’t as compelling as the actors who play their dads. (Cohen also does most of his part in a kind of shallow pastiche of Marlon Brando‘s line readings in A Streetcar Named Desire and The Wild One, which, as Joe Morgenstern notes, doesn’t work.) Besides, after the first two acts, where the director and actors catch us up in the flow of action, the dramatic devices are too easy to spot, the resolution too pat, and some of the scenes (like that last Coenesque clash in the woods) too hard to swallow.

That doesn’t mean though, that I’m not happy to see a movie that tries as hard as The Place Beyond the Pines, and that I won’t be rotting for Cianfrance to realize his grander, darker neo-noir ambitions some day. After all, two acts are better than none. And I’d rather see a young actor trying to copy Marlon Brando in an Elia Kazan movie than trying to copy Arnold Schwarzenegger in something by John McTiernan. Or a script that took 30 rewrites and still still didn’t make it,  than one that shouldn’t have been written at all. 

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