Berken’s review published on Letterboxd:
In a lot of ways The Place Beyond The Pines is a powerfully directed mess, as many people have pointed out, but what salvages its story is the effectiveness of its core theme - how easily parents can lose guidance over who their children become. Though its not actively pointed out by the film, both of the sons in the final act end up broken as people in various ways by the legacies left to them by their fathers (and I'm actually not talking about the obvious plot point that leads one child to carry a grudge, but the subtext of who these characters fundamentally are and what has made them that way). In fact, I would have bet anything that this movie was written by Cianfrance while fretting over the birth of a child and his various concerns over ways his actions could negatively impact who that child grows into (interviews have confirmed my suspicions.)
Let's look at both children separately:
A) Bradley Cooper's son fills the vacancy left by his parents' divorce and father's prioritizing of work over family by assuming the identity of a hard partying druggie and Jersey Shore wannabe. He's also as entitled and selfish as you would expect a child born into wealth and privilege without a steady guiding hand to be. People have said the Bradley Cooper section is less crucial to the story being told, but it establishes all of these factors that ultimately negatively impact his child - his ambition and rise to a demanding job, his wealthy background, and the friction with his wife that will lead to a divorce. It also presents him as a well-meaning, moral but flawed man, which is crucial to the theme as well in that it demonstrates that decent people can screw up their kids too.
B) Gosling's son's undoing, meanwhile, is also predicated on everything his father has left him - a genetic predisposition towards violence and aimlessness, a hole in his life where his biological father should be, and ultimately an unsavory role model that nevertheless proves incredibly attractive to a confused 17 year old kid. (For the record, I find it disappointing that the movie glosses over the impact the child's clearly loving mother and adopted father should have had on him. Perhaps Cianfrance wanted to demonstrate that sometimes even two loving and available parents aren't enough?)
Admittedly, this is far from a perfect movie - the third act, its most thematically rich, is also its least engaging on a visceral level and most dependent on unlikely coincidences. The third act is also too short to fully flesh out everything I've written above, most of which has to be inferred from the context instead (something most viewers won't bother to do). Yet in a world where movies like Argo win Oscars for being solid thrillers despite lacking interesting themes or characters, I can't help but be grateful for a movie that delivers on all three counts, however flawed and unwieldy it might be.