Derek Cianfrance (2012)

Blue Valentine ended with Ryan Gosling walking away from his wife, her child and the camera in the direction of a distant fireworks display.   The Place Beyond the Pines, Derek Cianfrance’s first film since, begins with a camera following Gosling towards the illuminations of a fairground.  He plays Luke Glanton, a motorcycle stuntman in a travelling show.  Later that evening Luke bumps (as a pedestrian) into Romina (Eva Mendes), a woman he had a fling with last time his itinerary brought him here.  Here is Altamont, Schenectady, New York:  the literal meaning of Schenectady in the Iroquois language is ‘the place beyond the pines’.  Soon afterwards, Luke discovers that he’s the father of Romina’s one-year-old son, Jason.  Like the girl in Blue Valentine, this child lives with his mother and a non-biological father – in this case, an African-American called Kofi (Mahershala Ali), who owns the house that they’re in.  The knowledge that he has a son turns Luke’s world upside down.  He convinces himself that, if he had the money, he could persuade Romina’s he’s got more to offer her and Jason than Kofi has.  Luke starts a new career as a bank robber, working in partnership with a grungy car repair man called Robin (Ben Mendelsohn).  Luke does the raids single-handed.  Once he’s got the money, he gets away on his motor bike; Robin is waiting in his truck nearby, Luke zips up a ramp into the back of the vehicle which then drives away.  The partnership is short-lived, though.  Luke is just about infantile in wanting his own way, and baffled, hurt and quickly violent when he doesn’t get it.  He gets to go to bed with Romina, buys ice cream for Jason and has a photograph taken of the three of them together.  But when Luke invites himself into the family home and starts putting together a crib for the child, it ends in a fight with the reasonably outraged Kofi.  Luke is briefly behind bars for assault.  Robin bails him out but by now Luke is out of control.  He does another bank job alone, a police car pursues him to a house where shots are exchanged, and Luke falls to his death from an upstairs window.

David Denby describes Derek Cianfrance as doing with Ryan Gosling here what Hitchcock did with Janet Leigh in Psycho.  This may be technically true but it feels very different.  First, the death of the biggest name in the cast less than halfway through isn’t a secret, as far as the director is concerned.  Second, by the time Luke Glanton departs the scene, he’s already outstayed his welcome.  Ryan Gosling is highly talented but his penchant for playing self-destructive charmers is beginning to risk limiting what he achieves as an actor.  He was great in Half Nelson and Blue Valentine but it’s frustrating to watch him doing another variation on the same theme, especially when the character here is so limited compared with the ones he played in the other two films.   Luke’s death and what comes immediately after are the best bits of The Place Beyond the Pines, as Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), the young police officer who shoots Luke, takes centre stage.  The confrontation between the two men in the bedroom of the house where Luke is hiding is well done.  Everything happens very quickly so you’re not sure who fired first:  that gives a reality to the subsequent interrogation of Avery by police colleagues and a session he has with a counsellor.  Bradley Cooper is impressive, more varied than I found him in Silver Linings Playbook.  That variety is what keeps the film afloat for a while – above the waves of schematism that eventually drown it.

In an interview with The Boston Globe Derek Cianfrance is quoted as follows:

‘It’s a masculine movie because it’s about fathers and sons. As a son and as a father I’m talking from a very specific place … The Greek idea of tragedy is that everyone tries to avoid something but ends up crashing into it anyway. Luke tries to avoid letting his son grow up like him. But in trying to avoid it, it happens anyway. Inside him there’s a toxic shame that manifests in his child.’

The idea that whatever happens in The Place Beyond the Pines is fatefully inevitable must be Cianfrance’s excuse for the melodramatic and incredible story.  (Because the film is long and self-important, several reviewers have latched on to the idea that it’s a ‘Greek tragedy in three acts’ or ‘an American epic’.)  After Avery has become a hero twice over – first for his courage in the shoot-out with Luke, then for exposing police corruption – the film lurches forward fifteen years.  By now, Avery is running for state attorney-general.  (His father was a Supreme Court judge and Avery is highly educated but his original intention was to work his way up through the ranks of the police force as if he’d had no advantages.)  He’s divorced now and his teenage son comes to live with him:  Avery reasonably points out to his ex-wife Jennifer (Rose Byrne) that the middle of a campaign for public office isn’t the best time for the boy to make the move but Jennifer is no more easily put off than Derek Cianfrance by things not making sense.  The surly, self-centred son AJ (Emory Cohen) starts at his new school, where he meets up with none other than Luke’s son Jason (Dane DeHaan).  (One review I’ve read reckons that the movie’s Greek tragedy credentials are confirmed by the sons’ names – ‘AJ’ is meant to bring to mind Ajax.)  It’s not worth wasting too many words on the details of what happens next:  suffice to say that the film ends with seventeen- year-old Jason buying his own motorcycle, paid for with money he steals from Avery while holding him at gunpoint, and setting out on the road to a life outside Schenectady.  Of course he’ll never, according to Cianfrance’s thesis, really get away.

Cianfrance wrote a good screenplay for Blue Valentine, where the storyline was pretty simple.  It’s possible that The Place Beyond the Pines, which he co-wrote with Ben Coccio and Darius Marder, exposes an inability to manage a more complex plot but more likely that Cianfrance really doesn’t think it’s necessary to do that.  He seems to think that invoking Greek tragedy means you can forget about realism entirely:  all that’s required is to get the characters into situations that demonstrate the sins-of-the-fathers theme – which is mixed up with suggestions of a kind of supernatural blood brotherhood between fathers and sons.  Cianfrance is far from the first male movie director to be seized with the idea that although men are bastards they’re interesting bastards – more interesting than the women to whom they cause suffering.   I suspect the same idea was at work in Blue Valentine but it wasn’t a problem there because Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams had roles of roughly equal size and were a compelling partnership.   The women in The Place Beyond the Pines are relatively minor although Eva Mendes is powerfully expressive as Romina.

Rose Byrne has a less rewarding role as Avery’s wife Jennifer but she’s at the centre of a scene that’s a distillation of Derek Cianfrance’s strengths and weaknesses as a director – in this film at least.   Avery is injured in the exchange of gunfire with Luke.  One evening during his convalescence he’s visited at home by three or four other cops.  He doesn’t even know a couple of them but, after getting themselves invited in to dinner, the senior member of the group (Ray Liotta) explains to Jennifer that they’d like Avery to come out with them to do ‘a bit of police work’.   He agrees to do so and this begins the chain of events that leads to his eventual exposure of the others’ criminal activity and their superiors’ concealment of it.   Cianfrance can write dialogue and he can direct actors, and he shows it here.  The sequence, as it’s happening, gets to you strongly.  All the players are good;  you feel offended on Jennifer’s behalf by the gatecrashers’ macho needling of her in the dinner table conversation.   Not much later, however, you’re offended by the implausibility of the whole set-up:  if the bad cops want to get money under false pretences, why do they choose to involve in the crime a public hero whom they’ve no reason to think shares their corruption?   Not much later on the film, the plotting had become so contrived that I found it hard to stay engaged by the actors.  I kept switching off, my attention suspended by disbelief.

There are some fine images in The Place Beyond the Pines, photographed by Sean Bobbitt.  The sight and sound of Luke’s motorcycle routine in ‘The Wheel of Death’ cage at the fairground provide, as David Denby says, ‘… existentialism in a nutshell:  life and possibly death on a journey going nowhere.’  What’s more, this occurs early on enough in the film to avoid contamination by what follows.  There’s a good moment when Luke and Robin enjoy their first bank robbery and Luke does a celebratory dance, holding Robin’s little dog:  it’s at this point that you’re most conscious of Luke’s separation from his son.  Later on, the images are more obviously resonant, as when Jason steals from a drug store and escapes on his bike – a reprise of his father’s earlier, bigger crimes.  The music by Mike Patton keeps announcing how heartfelt and profound the whole thing is but Cianfrance’s choice of music playing on car radios etc (‘Please Stay’ by The Cryin Shames, ‘Maneater’ by Hall and Oates) is more distinctive and interesting.  The cast also includes Harris Yulin as Avery Cross’s father and Bruce Greenwood, who’s good in his small role in spite of its similarity to the one he played so recently in Flight:  Greenwood has to ask Bradley Cooper’s hero-in-waiting the same kind of tough what-really-happened questions that he put to Denzel Washington.

14 April 2013