Case in point: The Place Beyond the Pines begins with a shirtless ripped Ryan Gosling covered in tattoos methodically flipping a butterfly knife in a dark trailer, before suiting up in a red leather jacket and walking through a Carnival into a tent with a screaming crowd, then boarding a dirt bike and riding into a steel cage circling two other riders. All in one take! It's a great start to a movie that ends up being a long three part saga, and a test of patience.
Gosling plays Luke, a soft-spoken bad-ass motorcycle driver who wants to quit the circus and settle down in Schenectady, New York after he learns he has a chance at starting a family with his old flame Romina, played by Cubana Eva Mendes. He meets Robin, a gritty mechanic played by Aussie actor Ben Mendelsohn, who offers him menial work, and together the two eventually decide on the age-old get-rich-quick scheme of robbing banks. Luke is a natural, and wants to up the ante with hopes of being a good provider, but Robin warns "If you ride like lightening, you're going to crash like thunder," which sounds like an awesome line, until you realize it's a rip off of Burgess Meredith's line from Rocky, substituting "eat" and "crap."
The movie shifts gears when rookie cop and new dad Avery, played by Bradley Cooper, gets on the chase. We follow Avery's story, as he becomes embroiled in Sche'dy PD corruption, and is forced to make some tough moral decisions. Ray Liotta enters at this point, playing an oafish crooked cop (Interestingly, both Liotta and Mendelsohn were also recently together in the less good Killing Them Softly playing equally slimy characters. It must be fun playing these parts.)
The third act takes place 15 years later and follows the next generation of Schenectadians (is that a word?) I'll spare the details to avoid spoilers, but also because I didn't quite know what to make of it.
The Place Beyond the Pines is written and directed by Derek Cianfrance, who also wrote and directed Blue Valentine, a powerful movie about the life and death of a modern relationship, which also starred Gosling (I would recommend Blue Valentine, except that the last time I did it was for a nurse I worked with and she came back to me complaining about how she just "couldn't handle it.") Anyway, there is plenty to like about this movie. Gosling and Mendelsohn are really great, Mendes too. The movie is shot on 35 mm, which after seeing so many movies filmed digitally, starts to seem grainy and Instagram-esque under the low light of upstate New York. There are many interesting themes regarding the role of fatherhood, the vicious cycle of crime and man's propensity towards risk and self-destruction. However, the messages are muddled at best. Also, though the movie feels like a three part Iñárritu film, the narrative is linear and after two and a half hours the story starts running low on gas. Tyler was right, beginnings are great. But there's something to be said for a timely ending.
Speaking of endings, I've been writing this movie blog for nearly four years, and it's been fun. But I'm going to have to hang it up for a while, since my wife's due date is almost here and her bag of waters is about to burst. Why do they call it "bag of waters," plural, and not just "bag of water"?
