Butler's Cinema Scene

Ryan Gosling

“THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES”  My rating: B (Opens April 12 at the Tivoli and Glenwood Arts)

140 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Derek Cianfrance’s “The Place Beyond the Pines” is actually two movies sharing several characters.

One of the movies, the first one, is borderline brilliant.  The second not so much.

The brilliance of Part I is largely due to Ryan Gosling, who re-amazes  every time he tackles a new role.

Here he is  Luke, a bleached-blond motorcycle daredevil with a seedy (is there any other kind?) traveling carnival.

 He’s in Schenectady, NY, doing his act, which consists of him riding his bike at top speed inside a big steel mesh ball. This is an apt

Eva Mendes

metaphor for his life – moments of terrifying excitement as centrifugal force allows him to ride upside down on the ball’s interior…but his path is a tight circle that never really takes him anywhere.

Luke discovers that Romina (Eva Mendes), the local woman with whom he spent a night the previous summer, has given birth to his son.  He surreptitiously follows her and her new guy (Mahershala Ali) to a church where the three-month-old baby is baptized.

Standing alone at the rear of the sanctuary, the heavily tattooed Luke finds himself incredibly moved by the ceremony and the knowledge that he is now a parent. Gosling expresses all this without saying a word…but you can see every thought and feeling on his features. It’s astoundingly moving.

Luke quits the carnival and takes a job at an auto repair shop, determined to support his son.  When fixing cars fails to generate much income, he and his scuzzy boss (Ben Mendelsohn) begin robbing banks.

 It ends badly.

Bradley Cooper

The theater savvy will have recognized this plot as essentially that of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Carousel,” with Gosling playing the Billy Bigelow character. Unlike the play, Luke’s ghost doesn’t return to Earth to observe his now-grown child – at least not literally.

But the sins – and love – of this unlikely father linger on in the life of his offspring, which brings us to Part II.

Late in the film’s first story we are introduced to Avery (Bradley Cooper), a young cop who kills Luke in a confrontation that may not be as heroic as the Police Department makes it out to be.

Now, in Part II, 17 years have passed and Avery has parlayed his law enforcement reputation into a run for the state’s attorney general.

The divorced Avery reluctantly agrees to let his troubled teenage son A.J. (Emory Cohen) move in with him. A.J. is a mess, a spoiled rich kid with a drug habit and gangsta ambitions. You want to slap the sneer off his face. (It can’t be a coincidence that Cianfrance has given him the same initials as mobster Tony Soprano’s son on “The Sopranos”).

New to the local high school, A.J. befriends another malcontent, the working-class Jason (Dane DeHaan), the son of Romina and the late Luke.  Jason, who has always been kept in the dark about his biological father, has no idea of the dark connection between their two families.

Dane DeHaan

Anyway, A.J.  goads Jason into stealing drugs. They have a run-in with the law.

And then Jason learns the truth about his real father’s death and decides that 17 years later it’s not too late for revenge.

Part I, focused by Gosling’s charismatic performance, advances with a sort of fatalistic inevitability.

But in Part II Cianfrance (“Blue Valentine”) and his writing partners (Ben Coccio, Darius Marder) stack the deck with far-fetched coincidences and fuzzy psychology.

Jason’s descent into violence and crime is a real narrative stretch, particularly since the film makes clear that his mother and stepfather  have provided him with a loving if not particularly affluent environment. DeHaan is a terrific actor (check out his brilliant perf in the second season of HBO’s “In Treatment”) but he cannot sell Jason’s transformation from run-of-the-mill teen to avenging angel – particularly on behalf of a long-dead man he never knew.

Thus the attempt to make the film an epic study of fathers and sons doesn’t quite succeed.

But if the big picture is a bit shaky, “The Place Beyond the Pines “ (that’s what the word “Schenectady” means in Mohawk)  gets an awful lot of the details right.

Cooper is solid if not outstanding (face it, anybody is going to look pallid after Gosling).

I’ve never been terribly impressed with Mendes, but devoid of makeup and glamor she gives a superb performance as Romina. Ali impresses as her astoundingly honorable spouse.

There’s also a creepy turn from Ray Liotta as a crooked cop who threatens to pulls down Cooper’s Avery. Other solid support is provided by Rose Byrne, Bruce Greenwood and Harris Yulin.

Cianfrance’s handling of certain key scenes is riveting, especially his introduction of Luke, which follows the character in a long, uninterrupted shot as he traverses the busy fairground where he is a prime attraction.

It’s definitely worth catching, but “A Place Beyond the Pines” is only half a great movie.

| Robert W. Butler