The Place Beyond the Pines is Derek Cianfrance’s ambitious and often beautiful if over-flowing follow-up to his 2010 drama Blue Valentine,
and like that film it revels in the pale and disappointed reflections
when the bright hopefulness of youth is cast on the present darkness.
For Cianfrance, aspirations and romanticism are dulled and surrender to
the day-to-day pressures and wear-and-tear of real life. Blue Valentine was the dark side of the hopeless romance emulated in films like Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything,
showing what happens to a pair of lovers (Ryan Gosling and Michelle
Williams) who realize they’ve hit the end, their doom predestined from
the start. The Place Beyond the Pines is Cianfrance taking on
the theme of fathers and sons, structured as a trilogy of short stories
of linked characters in a stew that boils over 15 years in Schenectady,
New York. But an interesting taste of allusion in these two films
bridges gritty drama to fantasy, a small locale to the cosmos. Blue Valentine,
with its sci-fi romantic getaway hotels and “robot vaginas,” along with
its future premonitions and discontinuities of communication, felt
oddly back-lit by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as
even empathetic exchanges between lovers was no more fruitful than the
frustrated enmity between human astronaut and the HAL computer. Pines similarly led my memory down the same terrain, feeling guided by another father and son trilogy, Star Wars.
Connecting modern drama to sci-fi spectacle and escapist fantasy, I
wonder if Cianfrance is constructing a tragic thesis about this specific
generation, raised on sci-fi and Hollywood escapism (the same
transition of ’70s Hollywood to the ’80s that was the focus of Argo),
in danger of choking on the debt incurred by its unimpeded idealism.
Yet this generation’s destiny is still tied to the previous generation’s
madness.
I guess there’s the more immediate question as to whether The Place Beyond the Pines is
even a success, and at this point, seeing the film once a couple of
days ago, I’m not certain if it’s a good film, an ear-worm picture that
will grow on viewers over time, or a heavy-handed follow-up failure by a
marvelous filmmaker who will need to finesse his craft. Many have
argued of its merits as a rare epic of dozens of characters playing big
roles, using broad gestures for its themes (not unlike the opera of
another familial trilogy, The Godfather, which is really the type of filmmaking to which Cianfrance aspires; Pines also very much reminded me of Coppola’s late family opera, Tetro).
Watching these gestures and motifs, I thought some obliqueness might
benefit Cianfrance who, with his big structural layout of mirroring
personalities and stunning tracking shots following each of them,
including a bravura opener that stalks motorcycle boy Ryan Gosling from
his trailer through a carnival and to a stunt-bike performance with two
other bikers in an enclosed ball, seems bent on making a classic, almost
literary, drama. His intimacy that was so precious with the two leads
from Blue Valentine now wants to blow down a brick wall and
pound emotions and characters into your memory cells, while at the same
time the spectacle, though showy at times, is still a whisper.
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