“The Place Beyond the Pines” is another Focus Features production starring indie darling Ryan Gosling and it tells a much more complex narrative than the expected romantic drama the trailer portrays.
Movie-goers are partially right in expecting a story about a new father forced to rob banks to support his son and win over his sweetheart, yes. What else would Ryan Gosling be doing in a heist movie opposite his real-life girlfriend, Eva Mendes?
However, the couple is hardly canoodling its way across the screen and into the audience’s hearts.
Gosling’s bad-boy act as heavily tattooed motorcycle stunt rider Luke Glanton — which came off as a somewhat lazy reprise of his character in “Drive” — may have charmed Mendes’ Romina during their fling the year before, but her attention is now divided between dependable boyfriend Kofi and the needs of Glanton’s infant son.
It is only after Glanton’s unsurprising demise mid-escape at the hands of rookie cop Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper) that the real story begins.
The next two chapters, centered first on Cooper’s character and later on the children of both men, feel as ominous as the first. An uncomfortable tension is prevalent from the first scene through the last.
There is an eye-catching use of parallel images to demonstrate relationships between characters, like several scenes in which characters are followed from behind by cameras centered on their backs as they walk.
The first of these introduces Glanton as a stunt rider, dressing on the way from his trailer to the circus tent in which he will perform on his motorcycle. This is repeated as Cooper’s character saunters through the police station, receiving congratulations for his heroic act in taking down Glanton.
The existentialist message of the story is not subtle.
After the midpoint of the film, it seems to drag the audience helplessly along to prove life is a run on a hamster wheel going nowhere. In another trick of parallel imagery, the children literally take the place their fathers had taken in their youth.
So it appears the pines in the title — which is a rough English translation of the Mohawk word “Schenectady,” where the movie is set — are symbolic of turbulent male relationships, whether between fathers and sons or colleagues, morally bankrupt as they may be — and Ray Liotta’s sinister policeman character definitely was.
Above anything, the film asserted that expectations and limitations of the world cannot be escaped, even in new places or roles in society — the places seemingly beyond the pines.
After all that running, audiences could be surprised to end the film at scenes more fitting for a prequel and without a real feeling of resolution.
Samantha Bares is a 19-year-old English sophomore from Erath, La.
This review contains spoilers.
