This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Auteur’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
Well, I did it. I watched this thing in the theatre back in March, gave it some time to gestate, and then plundered through a rewatch. I have now spent close to five hours in director Derek Cianfrance's bloated, epic, patriarchal world of loser fathers and the loser sons that want to be loved by them, and I am no better off because of it, except now I have a specific example to point to whenever someone asks me why they shouldn't skip forward fifteen years or introduce brand new characters two hours into a film.
It's a real shame too, because the first hour of the film is damn near perfect, bravura filmmaking. Cianfrance introduces us to Luke Glanton, the central character around whom the entire film revolves, in a showstopping long take that follows him from inside his carnival trailer to his act, a daredevil stunt involving three motorcyclists and a spherical cage. Yes Luke is a carnie, a slave to the road, and victim to an absentee father, fated to circle the country performing circus tricks. When we meet him he has just returned to a place he was a year ago, when unbeknownst to him he fathered a child through a one-night stand with Romina (Eva Mendes). Determined to be the kind of man his father never was, Luke quits the carnival and promises to take care of Romina and baby Jason, even though she is now living with another man who is raising the child as his own. Desperate for cash, and faced with hopeless job prospects, Luke turns to robbing banks, with a sociopathic auto mechanic (Ben Mendelsohn) he befriends, which ultimately leads to his death at the hands of a rookie policeman.
Cianfrance tears into his characters and this location in upstate New York with controlled passion, dissolving through scenes thick with texture, recalling at times Kubrick or Lynch, while Mike Patton's (of Faith No More fame) fantastic, seething, minimalist score quietly underlines the sinister fatalism of it all. The film also has the honor of being the only one of the three Ryan Gosling films released this year that actually manages to capitalize on the actor's piercing stare.
My only issue with this part of the film is I would have appreciated more obstacles forcing Luke into his crime spree; in a film that lasts 140 minutes, what is a few more to show the man actually trying to be legitimate - I mean really? How about one or two dead ends? If Cianfrance's intent was to find nobility inside this cipher he didn't succeed.
Switch gears to Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), the putz police officer who killed Luke, tormented with guilt at leaving Jason fatherless, and easily susceptible to a gang of corrupt policemen due to his newfound hero status putting him above reproach. He finally decides to stand up to the corruption and in return demands a job with the district attorney, which will ultimately lead to a run for Attorney General. Again, any nobility in his actions is completely undermined by the fact that he trades this political opportunism for being an absentee father to his own son A.J.
Cut to fifteen years later (I'll admit to laughing out loud in the theatre at the title card), and A.J. and Jason are all grown up, and happen to be in the same school, and happen to meet one day, and...don't worry, if you don't know where the film is going to go from here Cianfrance will tell you and show you, over and over and over again; he'll even hold your hand through it. And this is where the film grinds to a halt for me. Two hours in and it is basically introducing new characters. Previously we've only seen A.J. and Jason as babies, so they both need to be established, and then Cianfrance has to walk us back through the entire film we just sat through, plot point by plot point as Jason suddenly wants to discover who his father was and what happened to him. It's preposterous, and eye-rolling to watch Cianfrance pretend to reap the benefits of the "sins of the father" bullshit, Shakesperean heights he believes he has reached. And it's interminable for an audience who has to sit through twenty-minutes of recap (oh look, there are pictures on A.J.'s staircase - maybe Jason will look at them), to get to what we all know is coming, because Cianfrance wrote himself into a hole with no other option. And it doesn't help that Jason and A.J. are complete losers, the latter a wannabe gangster with gold chains who likes to rap, and whose implied racism when he acknowledges Jason's adopted dad is completely unnecessary, making him look like a total asshole. Throughout the film, each chapter falls victim to the law of diminishing returns, but the trap it ultimately falls into, and a sure sign of danger in any screenplay, is being forced to unspool twenty pages of exposition that serve no narrative purpose except just to get to a specific ending.
But what else was Cianfrance to do? That's easy; he's done it before, in Blue Valentine. That film was a tour de force debut that focused on a single relationship, and mined challenging and intimate material by fracturing the story, juxtaposing past and present to uncover deeper truths about the lives of its two characters. The Place Beyond The Pines could have benefitted greatly by the same stylistic choices. That way A.J. and Jason could have been peppered throughout the film, and the story could have built to its double revelation (the one to the audience, and the one to Jason) simultaneously, and would have made for a much more emotional and less tedious climax.
But I get it. This is Derek Cianfrance's coming-out film, a sophomore effort that more than a few times recalls Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, in the way it attempts to distance itself from its predecessor. This is his sprawling epic masterpiece, proof that he can navigate a multi-generational tale of retribution just like Scorsese, and he clearly runs with it, right into a giant corner. One that all the atmosphere and compositional brilliance in the world cannot save him from.