Review: ‘The Place Beyond The Pines’

“The Place Beyond The Pines” is the best kind of movie, the kind with a very strong, character-based story that goes to some unexpected places, populated with some great actors, backed by an excellent score, the whole time feeling like a real and lived-in time and place, and all told with the type of sure-handed direction that can’t be ignored or taken for granted. 

This epic story of fathers and sons starts out with dirt bag carnival worker Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling, Gangster Squad, Drive) who makes his living by driving a motorcycle inside a tiny metal sphere while two other guys on motorcycles, which means he is good with motorcycles and obviously digs the adrenaline rush of pulling off something like that, both of which will come in handy later on. When he rolls back through Schenectady, NY for the annual carnival stop, he finds out that Romina (Eva Mendes, The Other Guys), a girl he hooked up with during a previous carnival stop, now has a cute little baby boy, and that cute little baby boy happens to be Luke’s son.

Luke decides that he needs to be in this kid’s life and be a good father since he didn’t have a good father and he’s afraid of the kid growing up to be a dirt bag like him, but he runs into problems when he realizes he has no prospects and no cash, and also it doesn’t help that Romina moved on and has a new man in her life, a man who is providing for her and her son and actually seems to be a pretty nice guy. So what’s ole Luke to do? What else is he supposed to think when an acquaintance (Ben Mendelsohn, Killing Them Softly, The Dark Knight Rises) offers him a chance to make some sweet cash money in the form of robbing banks? It was inevitable, really, so Luke goes down that road, all in an effort to provide for a son he didn’t even know he had, all because he felt so abandoned by his own father, blaming him for his current state.

Luke’s story ultimately dovetails into the story of lawyer turned rookie police officer Avery Cross, who has his own daddy issues, both in the form of following in the footsteps of his very successful father and then being a father to his own infant son AJ and a husband to his doting, concerned wife Jennifer (Rose Byrne, Knowing, X-Men: First Class). And Avery has his own set of problems outside of all the familial stuff, including having to deal with a bad case of police corruption and a police chief who wants nothing to do with any of it, and a shootout that made him a local hero in the media but also left him with some pyschological trauma, so he has quite a bit going on, driving him to do some thing that he surely never figured he would end up doing.

This story gets epic, and this movie shows that a story can be “epic” without having to involve fantasy monsters and far away kingdoms and huge battles between armies on a giant field. Instead the epic feeling comes from the repurcussions of characters’ actions and how they reverberate through entire generations, which at one point necessitates a huge 15-year jump in the story, introducing a final act to the movie that ties everything together and galvanizes the father-son theme. Now to get this feeling across, and to spend so much time with these characters and trying to understand them and their motives, the movie does get a little long, but in the end I do think the extra bit of length works for the movie overall because of the patience shown with rolling this story out and letting things simmer and cook until everything is ready to boil over, which is does several times over.

“The Place Beyond The Pines” alternates between crime action, introspective character drama and melodrama and this could have been an ugly mash up of tones and styles, but it is all quite coherent and cohesive, resulting in the kind of original and interesting movie that people love to claim is never made anymore. Sick of your basic movies about superheroes in spandex and alien space beams in the middle of cities and high concept comedies involving body switches and odd couple pairings? Then get thee to the theater and support something that actually stands out from the pack as something different.