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. 

     

Master monster maker

Roger Corman takes aim at needlessly inflated production values

Roger Corman started his career as a reader for Fox. When his notes on the excellent Gregory Peck western The Gunfighter (1950) were used without due accreditation his innate rebelliousness, or chutzpah, or spite, first made itself known. He quit, and without any studio support made Monster From the Ocean Floor, aka Monster Maker, aka It Came From the Ocean’s Floor (1954)—I could use up my entire word-count on alternate titles—whose budget, says IMDb, was $28,000, though I could be persuaded that the actual money spent was far less.

Few noticed it at the time, but a giant of American cinema was born, an absurdly prolific producer/writer/director who would redefine the bottom line, innovate the industry, and recognize the audience’s willingness to go along with the baldest discontinuities, flimsiest sets and most ridiculous plots if there was a pay-off at the end. He spotted and set trends, capitalized on controversy, got bikers' engines running, gave pivotal breaks to young artists who would go on to become some of the most revered filmmakers of our age, and blazed a broad trail for this slippery thing we call independence. Corman directed more films in 1957 than most filmmakers make in an entire career. His product dominated drive-ins for decades, and the oft-made claim that none of his pictures ever lost a dime is only a slight exaggeration. Though he would eventually distribute work by Bergman, Fellini and Kurosawa, the question was always a matter of delivering the goods and bringing home the bacon; art was largely accidental, or a bi-product of audacity. Audacity came naturally to Corman, and there’s a case to be made for audacity elevating some of his 400-plus films to their own kind of artistry.

Bruce Dern doses Peter Fonda in The Trip (1968)

Corman’s still at it. Alex Stapleton’s Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel catches up with him in Puerto Vallarta, deep in production on Dinoshark (2010). Early in the documentary we get some deadpan practical filmmaking tips from this slim, sophisticated octogenarian: “We feel the monster should kill someone fairly early…” But most of Corman’s World is comprised of archival footage and talking heads. These elements are sewn together in a pretty pedestrian manner, and occasionally the editing fumbles with the coverage (why we need to keep switching from wides to close-ups in the interviews is beyond me), but the story Stapleton wants to tell, that of Corman’s singular legacy—the burned bridges and betrayals, not so much—is told effectively and very, very entertainingly.

top: Peter Bogdanovich

bottom: David Carradine

There are lively testimonies from Corman’s most stalwart collaborators, his wife and co-producer Julie Corman most notably, from Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy—couldn’t they have found some more interesting critics?—and, of course, from the stunning roster of filmmakers who were supported by Corman in their youth. Martin Scorsese, Peter Fonda, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme, Bruce Dern, Joe Dante, Pam Grier, John Sayles, William Shatner and Robert De Niro all drop by to describe Corman’s persona, techniques, mystique and work ethic, though I think the best material comes mainly from David Carradine, whose insightful in both his praise and criticism of Corman’s career, Peter Bogdanovich, whose tale of trying to incorporate half-naked telepathic women into Gill-Women of Venus, aka Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women (1968) is priceless, and Jack Nicholson, who actually cries—at least I think he does; he’s wearing sunglasses and covering his face—as he declares his gratitude to Corman for being the only guy in Hollywood to give him work for the first ten years of his career.

Jack Nicholson

Metro Cinema’s screenings of Corman’s World are paired with screenings of two of Corman’s finest works as director: X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963), starring Ray Milland, and the LSD-exposé The Trip (1968), written by Nicholson and starring Fonda, Dern, Susan Strasberg and Dennis Hopper, which I must of watched about a dozen times as a teenager, and probably only one of those times while actually high on LSD.