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.
