DVD Review: “The Place Beyond the Pines” Directed by Derek Cianfrance

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DAN WALKER ON FILM

Cast:

Ryan Gosling (“Lars and the Real Girl”, “Drive”)

Bradley Cooper (“The Hangover”, “Limitless”, “Silver Linings Playbook”)

Eva Mendez (“Training Day”)

Bruce Greenwood (“Thirteen Days”, “Capote”, “Mao’s Last Dancer”)

The opening of this movie brought to mind Ryan Gosling’s 2011’s “Drive”, a movie I disliked enough to remember immediately.  His characters in the two movies could easily have been the same person.  Instead of being a stunt car driver (like he is in “Drive”), in “The Place Beyond the Pines” he is a stunt motorcycle rider.  He is once again being portrayed as a brooding, dark and heavy character who says few words and reacts violently.  Like “Drive”, the point of Gosling’s scenes are his face, which is most often seen in close-ups without dialogue.  I just have a difficult time finding him convincing playing these types of characters but, based on the popularity and imdb ratings of the two movies, I’m in the minority.

The Schenectady, NY-set story is a watchable multi-generational macho melodrama.  Tough guy loner Luke (Goslin) finds out he has an infant son when he visits the home of one of his previous conquests, Romina (Eva Mendez) after she approaches him at the motorcycle stunt performance that opens the movie.  With her “Do you remember my name?” greeting, you know the significance of her approach.  To prove he is a responsible father, Luke begins committing crimes to support his “family”, which already has a responsible father figure, Kofi (Mahershala Ali, in a thankless role as the character you feel the worst for).

The movie opens with Luke’s shirtless, muscular, and inked torso rhythmically opening and closing a switchblade (to show how dangerous he is) before he goes out to perform his three-riders-in-a-spherical-cage stunt.  The opening shot is impressive in that there are no cuts and Gosling appears to be one of riders.  The hand-held riding/chase scenes are likewise well done.

I felt like I was watching three different movies because I didn’t find the storytelling to be fluid and the experience was almost jarring in that regard.  The movie is deceptively sold as a confrontation between characters played by Gosling and Bradley Cooper but their one scene together lasts only a few seconds and there was no build-up to it.

I’ve only seen Gosling in the movies I listed in his credits and this one, and he shows no range in any of them, although I liked “Lars” a lot.  Cooper’s performance as Avery (left) is similarly limited, although he’s shown as both an honest and honorable cop and, later, a corrupt and calculating politician.  All the portrayals – including Avery’s son AJ and Luke’s son Jason (Emery Cohen and Dane Dehaan respectively, below) — are good but almost no one is likeable.  Romina is so often apprehensive or miserable that you dread her appearances.   Ray Liotta (as a crooked cop) and Bruce Greenwood (as a crooked DA) have appearances that are short, unpleasant, and almost gratuitous.  Most of the movie’s interactions are antagonistic or adversarial.  Any message this movies sends out is a bad one.  The movie’s title, more appropriate for a murder mystery or horror film, is a reference to its setting and comes from the meaning of the Mohawk word Schau-naugh-ta-da, meaning “place beyond the pine plains.”

I didn’t list any previous credits for director/co-writer Cianfrance because I haven’t seen any of his movies and I’ve been told “Blue Valentine”, while good, was very depressing, which is the type of movie I really have to be in the mood to see.  The experience of watching “The Place Beyond the Pines” does nothing to inspire me to see “Blue Valentine” or Cianfrance’s future efforts.

DPW

October 7, 2013

I have to qualify my opinion of Gosling by again mentioning I’ve seen only three of his movies in their entirety.   I couldn’t get past the first hard-to-watch scene of Henry Bean’s 2001 “The Believer”, where Gosling’s Jewish yet anti-Semitic character picks on a much younger and smaller Hasidic Jewish kid.   I stopped watching George Clooney’s 2011 “The Ides of March” because it didn’t hold my interest.  In “Lars and the Real Girl”, his performance is deadpan and all the activity in the film comes from people around him.    He’s in so many movies, I figure there has to be something to him, so I’m keeping an eye out for a movie/role that will allow him to show more range or another side of his acting ability.

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