Film review: The Place Beyond the Pines

The Place Beyond the Pines
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes
Director: Derek Cianfrance
Category: IIB

The director of Blue Valentine, Derek Cianfrance, is reunited with that moody, anti-romantic drama's lead actor in The Place Beyond the Pines. This time, however, Ryan Gosling shares top billing with Bradley Cooper in an atmospheric drama that focuses on two men who are hardly ideal father material.

Gosling plays Luke, a brooding stunt motorcyclist with a travelling carnival that's temporarily pitched up in the small, upstate New York town of Schenectady (whose name is loosely derived from the Mohawk word for "place beyond the pines").

With tattoos on his pretty face, arms and body, and a penchant for wearing torn T-shirts, peroxide blond-haired Luke's the kind of fellow who spells trouble with a capital T, the type of trouble that certain women find attractive. That's what happened with local gal Romina (Eva Mendes) and a previous rendezvous has left her pregnant.

In contrast, law school graduate turned police officer Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper) appears - at least at first glance - to be straight arrow material. But after crossing paths with Luke, Cross, the ambitious son of a retired, but still influential state supreme court judge (Harris Yulin), shows himself to be someone who attracts and causes his own share of trouble.

The tendency to be a magnet for trouble is something both Luke and Avery pass to their male progeny, even though neither man has spent much time with their sons. So the omens are not good when Avery's son A.J. (Emory Cohen) and Luke's son Jason (Dane DeHaan) become acquainted at school and connect through their mutual taste for recreational drugs.

With a running time of about 140 minutes and an atypical three-pronged narrative structure, there invariably is a sprawling quality to The Place Beyond the Pines. There's also little doubt that it's an ambitious work and its filmmakers intended to invest deep meaning rather than just comfortably entertain.

Particularly in the last third of the film, with its contrived plotting, the convenient "biology is destiny" conclusion and Emory Cohen trying too hard to talk and act like a young Marlon Brando, one gets the distinct sense that Cianfrance is guilty of having overreached in what is, after all, only his third feature film.

However, there's also little doubt that much of what preceded the disappointing third act makes for involving, even downright hypnotic, viewing propelled by a mesmerising performance by Gosling and a clever portrayal by Cooper. On the technical front, Sean Bobbitt's cinematography deserves credit for contributing to the moody, raw feel of the work. But what lingers above all is the haunting, spare score from composer - and Faith No More lead singer - Mike Patton.

yvonne.teh@scmp.com

The Place Beyond the Pines opens on September 26