Don’t let the quiet, indie stylings of “The Place Beyond the Pines” fool you. This is a big movie with a lot on its mind. Slowly, it unfolds into a kind of epic. For its co-writer and director Derek Cianfrance, whose last film was the tortured love story “Blue Valentine,” “Pines” represents a step up in ambition similar to the one Paul Thomas Anderson took from “Hard Eight” to “Boogie Nights.”
Cianfrance draws a superb performance from Ryan Gosling as a traveling carnival performer with a gift for riding a stunt bike. An encounter with an old girlfriend (Eva Mendes) at the fairgrounds in Schenectady, NY, leads him to a discovery that she had intended to keep hidden from him: He has a son, Jason, whom she is raising with another man (Mahershala Ali).
Luke (Gosling) quits his job and begins to search for something that will enable him to support his child. A fellow motocross buff (Ben Mendelsohn) who gives him a job as a mechanic suggests: Why not try robbing banks?
I’ll stop the plot summary there (and suggest you not read too many other reviews) because it’s a great pleasure when a filmmaker with Cianfrance’s lyricism, earthy naturalism and respect for composition can also execute a series of sharp plot turns as thrilling as the ones Luke pulls off on his motorbike. I will warn you, though, that this is a soulful, sober, deliberately paced film that is not to be confused with a popcorn picture.
“Pines” widens its scope to bring in an ambitious cop (Bradley Cooper, who usually annoys me but is acceptable here), a sinister fellow officer (Ray Liotta), a prickly DA (Bruce Greenwood) and, finally, two wayward high school friends (Emory Cohen, who is terrifically slimy, and Dane DeHaan, who was the lead in last year’s “Chronicle”).
Though “Pines” is very much aligned with moviedom’s somewhat tiresome romanticization of outlaws and its reflexive castigation of police, its cops-and-robbers framework underlies a profoundly satisfying symmetry. The film is all about pairs, matches and repetition as the characters struggle to break out of patterns seemingly set by impetuous split-second decisions.
Neither Gosling’s character nor Cooper’s (they don’t share much screen time) is wholly sympathetic, yet both put themselves in considerable danger by trying to give money to the same woman for different reasons. The two teens, at first drawn together by their love of obliviousness (they abuse drugs together), are then pulled apart by their knowledge of history.
Though the film doesn’t push any one theme too heavily, it makes time for surprisingly heartfelt moments of moral reflection. Wrongdoing sets the stage for even more contemptible behavior, building to a moment of pure, bewildering outrage elegantly disguised: A sleeping infant is being lifted carefully out of his crib, shortly to be returned to the same place without even being woken. On the surface innocuous, the act is an intrusion and an abuse that makes you want to scream.
Cianfrance, like P.T. Anderson, makes the camera roam and soar with painstakingly devised tracking shots and swooping crane work. Such tricks can be abused, but this director has a sure sense of tension, making the bank scenes and the motorcycle chases fantastically gripping. Equally important, he knows how unnerving it can be not to show something, as when Liotta’s face is partially blocked during a scene shot inside a car and in another when we can’t tell whether someone has been shot to death or not.
It’s a film of a master craftsman, a director who can imbue the ordinary with poetry. Who would have thought that humble Schenectady, that upstate burg, would inspire the titles of two ambitious indie films? First there was “Synecdoche, New York” (which rhymes with Schenectady) and now there’s this one. The town’s name is a Mohawk word. It means “the place beyond the pines.”