In which we still don't learn how to spell Synecdoteeodcee, New York.
Director: Derek Cianfrance
Writers: Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio, and Darius Marder
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Dane DeHaan, Eva Mendes, Ben Mendelsohn, Ray Liotta, Emory Cohen
Runtime: 140 mins.
2012
The Place Beyond the Pines strives to be epic with every fiber of its being. In a lot of ways, it fails. Yet it remains a textbook case of how much mileage a movie can gain from a strong start. In fact, I have to admit that I was sold from the very first shot:
We open to blackness, with an undercurrent of indistinct noise. As the title cards pass before us, we hear a new sound: a crisp, repetitive clinking noise that is vaguely reminiscent of the clanking of train cars steadily passing by. When we finally cut to our first image, we see the tattooed torso of Luke (Ryan Gosling), his hands expertly snapping a butterfly knife as he paces back and forth in a small trailer. His body language is restless, the click-clacking of the knife metronomic. He suddenly embeds the knife in a wall and leaves the trailer. The continuous shot... continues... as we follow him, a colorful fairground opening out before us, the previously dulled sounds of carnivalesque carousing now raucous and all-encompassing. The camera trails behind Luke, in a manner familiar to anybody who watched The Wrestler, or Breaking Bad. Luke passes fluorescent rides and games, pink and blue lights illuminating the night. He takes a turn into a darker, more subdued part of the fairground and heads for a tent. When he enters the tent, we are met with the sounds of revving engines, cheering fans, and an incomprehensible announcer. He heads for two other motorcyclists, and joins them on a third cycle of his own. The mounting of the cycle is the first moment we see Luke's face, a brief glimpse before he dons his helmet. Then the cyclists enter the steel cage, a metal sphere barely big enough to accommodate the three of them. The crowd erupts as the cyclists each begin circumnavigating the inside of the sphere, weaving in and out of each other's paths in daredevil fashion. The first shot ends.
Everything that is good and right about The Place Beyond the Pines is encompassed in that first shot, from the cycle of violence as represented by the click-clacking butterfly knife, to the visual coupling of Luke's identity with his motorcycle, to the long trailer-to-tent trudge that evokes an inevitable symbolic march towards danger and destruction. It's all there, and it's beautiful.
The movie never stops being beautiful, but it never recaptures the precision and economy of storytelling that the first shot offers.
I was pleased to know next to nothing about the film before watching it, so I was double pleased to find that I had a lumbering crime thriller on my hands. I use the word lumber both because it is big, and because it is slow, though it's not as inelegant as that word might suggest.
The conflicts at the center of TPBP are simple, almost elemental. A father wants to provide for his child, but to do so he needs financial stability--so the mother of his child, Romina (Eva Mendes), tells him. Being a man of violent tendencies and scant bankable talents beyond cycling (a job that requires him to travel), he turns to robbing banks with a car mechanic named Robin (Ben Mendelsohn). Bad decisions lead to further bad decisions with fatalistic clockwork.
Even the dialogue is boiled down to its basest form. Luke gets the idea to rob banks by asking Robin what he could do for money, to which Robin replies that he could rob banks. None of the verbosity of Quentin Tarantino or the quirks of the Coen Brothers. Characters express themselves as basically as they can, with as few words as possible--an ideal role for Ryan Gosling, who has made a career of being the go-to actor for this sort of minimalistic scene-chewing.
And chew he does. My first impression of Gosling when I watched him in Drive was one of boredom. Now that I've seen him in five more films--Fracture; Lars and the Real Girl; Half Nelson; Crazy, Stupid, Love; TPBP--I have completely overturned that initial opinion. He expresses inner conflict with two words (or sometimes zero) in a way that most actors need a monologue to accomplish. He drips charisma, yet erects a facade so airtight that you can't tell where the charisma is dripping from.
Gosling doesn't carry this movie singlehandedly, though he probably could have. Also firing on all cylinders are the cinematography and the soundtrack. The former is a constant pleasure, and serves to highlight the real central figure of this movie, the sprawling woods of Scyccnycdecdoche, New York. The wide shots of the forest never cease to be stunning, and remain beautiful even as the woods take on a darker, purgatorial identity. The close shots of Luke's cycling are visceral and dangerous. Transitioning between the two is a real pleasure. Even away from the woods, the camerawork excels. A particular favorite scene of mine was a police chase from the perspective of the cops on Luke's tail. The chase takes us through suburban neighborhoods and a cemetery, the passenger seat camera following Luke's bike as it bobs and weaves between the gravestones.
But it's Mike Patton's soundtrack that ties the mood's ribbon into a bow. From the moody, melodious strings to the tinkling of bells, the soundtrack manages to be the aspect of TPBP that captures its purported epic scope most meaningfully.
The rest of this review is going to deal with SPOILERS, namely developments that unfurled halfway through the movie and caught me completely off-guard. And I liked it that way. Continue at your own discretion.
About halfway through the film, everything changes. The cemetery chase scene ends in a clumsy shootout between Luke and lone policeman Avery (Bradley Cooper) that sees Luke dead on the pavement and Avery injured but still very much alive. Rather than offering up a rapid denouement and ending the movie where you might expect, the film transitions to the perspective of police officer Avery (a transition brilliantly smoothed over by the aforementioned chase scene from the officers' perspective). We see Avery deal with the trauma of the shootout, the recovery process, domestic unrest, and what will prove to be the two most formative forces in his life: guilt over police corruption, and guilt over the death of Luke. Avery, himself the father of a toddler, cannot shake the feeling that he deprived Luke's little boy of a father figure.
So now Avery is our protagonist, and the repercussions of the shootout echo through his life. His lost innocence, his resolve to fight back against corruption, and his ultimate willful betrayal of fellow officers can all be traced back to that one fateful bank robbery gone wrong.
I was fascinated by the jarring shift of protagonists. It's an experiment with audience expectations that I've always yearned to see more often. When I was very young, I would see the iconic imagery of Free Willy--you know the image, with Willy leaping over that little kid--and I would wish the movie would have the balls to let Willy's jump fall a bit short, crushing the boy and ending the movie with tragedy. To this day I haven't seen Free Willy, so that is still my primary association with the movie. Too dark? Certainly. Irresponsible from a storytelling perspective? Absolutely. But that was a kind of subversion that I craved.
This predilection made me favorably disposed to Avery's stretch as the protagonist. I enjoyed watching it. Upon retrospect though, it becomes clear that his story is not particularly good. The naive cop fighting against corruption in the police force is a trope wrapped in a cliche at this point, and the narrative here doesn't bring anything new to the table. It hits all the familiar beats, right down to Ray Liotta playing a threatening villainous cop figure.
This segment of the movie manages to have three things going for it. One is an excellent performance by Bradley Cooper, who does all he can with the nicey-nice persona and manages to somehow make us like him and root for him. The second thing is the continued, albeit somewhat stiffened and standardized, excellence of the cinematography. Which also plays into the third aspect: Almost everything really interesting about the Avery segment is predicated on the Luke segment having come first.
Writer/director Derek Cianfrance is trying to show the widespread consequences of violent acts, and wants to communicate the ways that cultures sustain and recreate themselves. To that end, the Avery segment is ripe with all sorts of juicy visual and narrative parallels to Luke's segment. Avery even ends up trying to give Romina the same ill-gotten bank money in the same parking lot where Luke gave it to her earlier in the movie! It's not subtle stuff, but it feels grand, and pleasing.
Also, it's nice for a movie to acknowledge (indeed, grind our faces in) the idea that the faceless policeman engaging in the shootout with our protagonist is actually a person with a life and a family of his own.
So we get Avery's arc. Then some text shoots onto the screen:
15 Years Later
This movie just doesn't end! We fast forward fifteen years and get plopped in the shoes of Jason (Dane DeHaan), the grown son of long-dead Luke, on the fateful day that he just so happens to meet and befriend AJ (Emory Cohen), Avery's grown son. Seriously, it's just complete coincidence that they become friends. Then they do a lot of drugs together and get each other in trouble. AJ has to deal with his overbearing father, who is now running for district attorney, and Jason searches for the truth about his own father.
This final stretch of the film is by far the most overwrought of the three. I found it watchable and almost enjoyable only because of the good grace the beginning of the movie bought for itself. This was a slow movie to begin with, and when you try to squish two more movies onto the end of it, you get a film that is buckling under its own weight. The continued parallels and callbacks to previous scenes and meaningful moments remain fulfilling, as the movie becomes about fathers and sons in a broader, mythic sort of way, but otherwise the threads are spinning and the wheels are fraying at this point.
Once again, a top notch performance keeps the movie afloat. Dane DeHaan communicates a tortured soul and a deep inner world that the role as-written didn't really call for. In other words, he goes above and beyond, and watching him makes watching his storyline worthwhile.
All told, we have a movie whose reach exceeds its grasp, or however the cliche goes. A movie that, had it ended with Luke's death, would have been a whole lot better and a good bit less interesting. A movie that feels like blowing up a full balloon, taut with tension, and slowly letting the air eke out until you only have about a half-full balloon at the end when you tie the knot. At least it didn't pop.
I appreciate TPBP's aspirations, I really do. And a lot of what's good--the cinematography, the soundtrack--remains good throughout. I only wish the narrative was as functional as it was formally interesting. Surely Cianfrance could have come up with a second and third arc that weren't stinky with cliches?
Try next day, Cianfrance. Try next day.
2.5 / 5 BLOBS
This movie review is dedicated to John Dominguez, who told me to watch this movie, so I did.
Try next day, lol
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