The biker, the cop, his kid and the biker's kid too

The title of Derek Cianfrance’s new film is a translation of Schenectady, a Mohawk term, and the name of the city in eastern New York state where this 140-minute tripartite crime drama unfolds. So even in his choice of title, Cianfrance is working to invoke a large historical canvas. The Place Beyond the Pines has a chronology that begins in the 1980s. Its style, atmospheres and themes draw upon certain tendencies in American movies of both the 1940s and the 1970s. Its multiple protagonists span generations, racial backgrounds, and class. Its setting feels indifferent to the 21^st century. The film is ambitious, and its ambitions, along with its largely blue-collar milieu and Cianfrance’s obvious craftsmanship are the elements I admire most. But like Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines overreaches in a way that, perhaps, betrays its author’s naïveté. Emotions burgeon and spill over, and as they spill over they feel less genuine, less invested with real experience.

In the first section, stunt biker “Handsome” Luke (Ryan Gosling, very compelling), a sort of poor man’s Evel Knievel, sloppily dressed, beach-bum-bottle-blonde, and covered in tats, turns up with a traveling carnival in Schenectady, where a year earlier he’d had a fling with Romina, a local waitress (Eva Mendes, mostly stuck playing an exhausted victim). Luke learns that that fling resulted in progeny, and his cool, cool heart begins to ache. He quits the carnival and determines to be a dad to little Jason and a partner to Romina—despite the fact that she’s got a boyfriend, who seems very nice and a good provider. Luke meets Robin, a backwoods mechanic and occasional bank-robber, played by Ben Mendelsohn, a very good actor from Australia, and one to watch out for; he was last seen looking even greasier in Killing Me Softly. Robin is the film’s most interesting character, partly because, unlike most of the other characters, his intentions aren’t overstated. (Robin nevertheless has the film’s most thudding line: “If you ride like lightning, you’re gonna crash like thunder.”) One suspects that lonesome Robin’s in love with Luke. He gives him a bed, a job, and what turns out to be a really bad idea: You need money to win that family of yours, don’t you? Let’s utilize your bike skills and rob a few banks. Complications ensue.

The second section follows Avery (Bradley Cooper), a rookie cop and son to a former state supreme court judge. Avery’s whole life changes in the time it takes to pull a trigger. It changes even more in the time it takes him to not refuse a bribe from a coven of corrupt cops helmed by Ray Liotta, our go-to guy for intimidating slime (see, once again, Killing Me Softly). Like Luke, Avery’s got a little boy, and when The Place Beyond the Pines enters its home stretch Luke and Avery’s boys will emerge to fill the narrative foreground, where they’re visited by the sins of their fathers, et cetera, et cetera. This final section loses much of the character development and attention to place that helped make the preceding 105 minutes awkward but absorbing. Forced plot mechanics take hold. The film meanders toward a resolution that feels flimsier with every climax.

Cianfrance is not lacking for audiovisual fluency. He’s good with portentous dissolves, very good at weaving evocative stray images together under the longer speeches (see the bit with Robin shooing geese for a nice example of this). But, somewhere in the grand scheming, his judgment with regards to emotional verisimilitude and narrative concision seems to falter. He may have it in him to make a truly great movie—there are stunning, even heartbreaking moments in both this and Valentine—but in order to achieve this he may have to stop trying so damned hard to make a Truly Great Movie. 

     

The Ides of March: All primary colours; no shades to be found

Based on Beau Willimon’s play Farragut North, which was loosely based on the 2004 Democratic primary campaign of Howard Dean, The Ides of March concerns a young press secretary’s education in the sort of compromise, corruption and throat-cutting that the weary sages tell us is essential to getting ahead in politics. But Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) has it both ways—he’s simultaneously idealistic and shrewd—so when push comes to shove his fangs push their way out of his baby gums and he proves to be the all-too apt pupil of his immediate superior (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the opposition’s poacher (Paul Giamatti), the manipulative journalist (Marisa Tomei) he thought was his pal and, of course, the charismatic candidate he works for, Pennsylvania Governor Mike Morris (director and co-scripter George Clooney), who mostly stays in the film’s margins until its final act, until then entering the foreground only for a highly conspicuous, strategically placed scene of intimacy between he and his true-blue wife.

Much of the pleasure to be had in The Ides of March emerges from the initial buzz of the promise of victory emanating from Morris’ camp, of which Meyers is the behind-the-scenes star. A couple of beautifully realized scenes find Meyers flirting with a smart, lovely intern named Molly (Evan Rachel Wood). Clooney has assembled a magnificent cast and, with the help of cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, he crafts some superb flights of ping-pong dialogue in carefully composed close-ups. For much of the first half, there’s a slightly exposition-heavy quality to the dialogue that feels weirdly stagey yet gradually makes sense as you start to glean just how much of what we’re hearing and seeing is illusory or fundamentally full of shit. And herein lies the film’s weakness: it is precisely as cynical as you’d expect a movie about US politics from Clooney and his regular producer/collaborator Grant Heslov to be, while lacking in any specific or especially poignant revelations. Everything is tweaked to play neatly into the narrative schema, including an unexpected death that constitutes the limpest sort of plot twist (the reason it’s unexpected is because there’s no good reason to expect it). Clooney is a fine directorial talent, but the material—occasionally clever but never wise—is finally more shallow than it clearly wants to be. Still, worth checking out if you’re curious.

Blue Valentine: Love rocks, then it's on the rocks

As Blue Valentine begins a small child searches for an ominously absent pet. It’s a smart method of alerting us to a more general suspicion that something’s missing in the lives of its central characters, the child’s parents Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams). Perpetually robed in paint-splattered pants and goofy animal sweaters, Dean’s an affectionate, playful father to little Frankie (Faith Wladyka), but he’s also childish and needy and starts drinking bright and early because apparently drinking doesn’t hamper his ability to paint houses. Cindy is by necessity more authoritative, probably the only one who makes sure Frankie eats reasonably well and gets to school in time. Cindy’s a nurse in a nearby clinic. A doctor there is eager to convince her to accept a transfer. Cindy’s procrastination in discussing the matter with Dean is, at the very least, conspicuous.

We then meet Dean and Cindy several years earlier, not long before they first met each other, when Dean worked for a Brooklyn moving company and Cindy studied medicine. A pattern is quickly established: for every scene that draws the younger Dean and Cindy closer together we’re given a counter-scene that shows the current Dean and Cindy moving farther apart. Blue Valentine, the sophomore feature from director Derek Cianfrance, written by Cianfrance with Cami Delavigne and Joey Curtis, proposes to carve out a love story by contrasting the moment of its birth with that of its apparent death, replete with bad sex, screaming, and violence. There are many insightfully rendered fragments of this relationship scattered throughout the film, many extraordinarily frank, even touching moments of vulnerability between Gosling and Williams, often shot in tight close-ups that at once heighten a feeling of intimacy and mutual isolation, so I’ve been struggling to sort out why it is that the film ultimately left me feeling unsatisfied. My best guess is that by focusing exclusively on either end of this story, by excising everything that happened in the middle, Blue Valentine neglects to give us a fully convincing sense of what this couple has shared, of the real hard work of marriage, of any sort of deeper connection between them besides the circumstantial. This manner of using only glimpses of a relationship’s progress to suggest something larger, complex and meaningful can work heartbreakingly well in, say, a song—given the working-class, east coast flavour, we might imagine Blue Valentine as a Bruce Springsteen song, or, given the film’s title, early Tom Waits—but as a feature film this love story feels a bit under-loved by its authors.

Much of what really works very well here occurs in the first half, including Cianfrnace’s imaginative use of instrumental versions of Grizzly Bear tunes. Dean’s conversations with his male coworkers at the moving company about how men and women fall in love possess a shaggy fraternal warmth that recalls similar scenes in David Gordon Green’s George Washington, particularly because of Dean’s somewhat overstated naïveté. Cindy’s more introverted and remote, yet the way we see her coasting through a mismatched relationship with a wrestler, caring for her grandmother, or ignoring the freaky outbursts of her father, a guy who’s got major problems with meatloaf, tells us something about her. As is so often the case in romantic love, Dean and Cindy’s convergence seems dependent on coincidence and impulsive decisions. Their courtship is basically a single impromptu date, incorporating a ukulele serenade and tap dancing, that’s very cute to watch unfold. They meet by chance, and by chance Cindy gets pregnant right around the same time. Feeling such longing for a woman he really doesn’t know yet, and having no clear ambitions to betray in any case, Dean hurls himself into becoming a husband and father, or at least the idea of it. Cindy’s reasons for being with Dean may be more practical, and fair enough, I guess. But I don’t think anyone whose ever given themselves to love-term love will recognize the foundations of something like that here. So do see the film for those sometimes vivid glimpses of passion and playfulness, for its most inspired floating moments of ecstasy or ache—just don’t expect it to all add up.