The Place Beyond the Pines

With The Place Beyond the Pines, Derek Cianfrance definitively establishes himself as an up-and-coming filmmaker with serious potential – as the movie, which tells an epic story involving multiple characters, boasts a cinematic and engrossing atmosphere that’s a palpable step up from his previous effort, 2010’s Blue Valentine. Cianfrance, working from a script cowritten with Ben Coccio and Darius Marder, does a superb job of immediately grabbing the viewer’s attention, with the film’s opening shot, a long, unbroken take that follows Ryan Gosling’s Luke as he walks through a busy carnival and hops aboard a motorcycle, getting things off to an impressively electrifying start and effectively establishing a lush, sumptuous tone that persists virtually from start to finish. It’s clear, also, that The Place Beyond the Pines‘ early success is due in large part to Gosling’s typically commanding performance, with the actor’s mesmerizing work, unfortunately, ensuring that the film does suffer when his character is offscreen – which ultimately makes it awfully difficult for Gosling’s costar, Bradley Cooper, to maintain a similar intensity within his own stretch of the proceedings. (Likewise, the movie’s final third fares even more poorly, as the emphasis is placed on a pair of entirely new characters.) Cianfrance’s ambitious narrative is, as a result, perhaps not quite as affecting as the filmmaker has intended, yet it’s impossible to deny the power of several key sequences – including a handful of astonishingly gripping bank-robbery interludes. The end result is an uneven yet impressive effort from Cianfrance that surely bodes well for his future endeavors, and it should certainly be interesting to see where the talented filmmaker goes from here.

*** out of ****