Film Review | The Place Beyond the Pines

It seems as though Ryan Gosling is such a beloved presence in Hollywood right now that he can play pretty much the same character in rapid succession without eliciting the slightest blip of complaint from either studio execs or the audience.

And so he more or less reprises his brooding petrol-head from Drive (2011) in The Place Beyond the Pines - reuniting with director Derek Cianfrance after their collaboration on the downbeat marriage break-up drama Blue Valentine (2010).

So shameless is the similarity that, even if you adore Gosling as an actor, it's hard not to get over the fact that he's presenting yet another iteration of a distinct type: post-James Dean cool, with hints of a potentially violent temper and a dry demeanour that, although effective, just looks too easy, especially if you're employing it in two films more or less in a row.

So perhaps it's just as well that, despite the film's marketing campaign understandably making the best of Gosling's superstar status, Cianfrance's multi-generational crime epic assures us (by virtue of its paunchy running time, if nothing else) that Gosling's Luke Glanton is just one part of a very large and intricate puzzle.

But the stunt-biker drifter is an important catalyst for this story of moral corruption and insidious family ties.

Revisiting his old stomping grounds of Schenectady, New York, Luke discovers that he is a father, owing to a brief fling with waitress Romina (Eva Mendes) a couple of years prior. Keen on assuming paternal responsibility despite the fact that Romina has settled into a new life with boyfriend Kofi (Mahershala Ali), Luke quits his stunt-driving gig and finds himself a job in Schenectady, assisting a mechanic, Robin Van Der Zee (Ben Mendelsohn). Business, however, is pretty dire, and the two resolve to rob banks to get some extra cash.

Initially, their partnership turns out to be a winning formula, with Luke's driving skills proving to be very handy when it comes to fleeing the scene of the crime.

But when it's made clear to Luke that all his efforts will be for nought, as Romina holds true to her decision not to break up her relationship with Kofi, he gets angry and sloppy - the result of which leads him to intertwine his fate with police officer Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper)... an encounter whose outcome ripples into the next generation.

At no point is Cianfrace's skill as a director ever put into doubt. 'Pines' is a film with a distinct texture and mood. The Schenectady setting feels lived-in and real, and it's clear that the working class are dear to the director's heart (he also co-wrote the script with Ben Coccio and Darius Marder). As is the case with most films involving criminally acquired cash for an ostensibly good cause, a sense of doom pervades the Luke storyline, and this is where the film works best. You know it's all going to go south faster than you can say 'hubris', and the pathos is all the more effective for Cianfrance's gritty depiction of the underclass that's affected by this criminal whirlwind.

But though it's signalled by a bold twist, the shift to Avery's storyline squashes the build-up of tension in favour of too-neat plot divisions. It's after this and a subsequent, more chronologically far-reaching shift, when you realise Cianfrance isn't content to just tell an emotionally gripping crime drama.

He's trying to say something about fathers and sons, about blood-ties and about the very real moral compromises we are sometimes forced to make for the sake of our loved ones. A noble ambition, to be sure. The problem is that what is actually being presented to us feels neither original nor vital. As the film plods forward into its inevitable and largely predictable third act, the characters begin to lose fewer and fewer of their particular features to become mere signposts for the film's well-trodden themes. Certain assumptions about masculinity appear to be taken for granted, and the film drifts along as an uneasy mix of gritty realism and morality tale (by way of Greek tragedy).

In a cinematic scenario oversaturated by 3D-enhanced comic book adaptations, remakes (and the remakes' sequels), it feels almostmorally wrong to criticise a finely acted, visually arresting drama.

But the audience is asked to swallow far too much: a two-hour-plus film that's divided into three distinct 'chapters', and whose thematic connections are made by sudden, contrived plot calculations just cannot be engaging.