The Place Beyond The Pines review

From the very first scene, Derek Cianfrance’s ‘The Place Beyond The Pines’ reeks of ambition. A tattooed Ryan Gosling, dressed in a distinctive red leather jacket, heads out of his trailer and into the night-time throng of a travelling carnival. The camera trailing him in one bravura Steadicam shot, we follow him into a crowded marquee where he mounts a motorcycle and joins two fellow riders as they perform a daredevil stunt, criss-crossing each other inside a ‘globe of death’.

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It’s a stunning way to announce Gosling’s reunion with Cianfrance, following their collaboration on the director’s searing debut ‘Blue Valentine’. From here, his character Luke runs into an old flame, waitress Romina (Eva Mendes), discovering she’s raising his child. He wants in on this life – though his master plan to provide for both involves quitting his stunt-job and using his bike to rob local banks with shady friend Robin (Ben Mendelsohn). With Gosling channelling the charisma he oozed in ‘Drive’, these scenes are nothing short of exhilarating.

Just as swiftly as Luke changes gears on his bike, so Cianfrance then re-aligns his focus to Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), the rookie officer on Luke’s case. Like Luke, Avery has a young son; he’s also naive and impressionable, held under the sway of Ray Liotta’s corrupt cop. Like Gosling, Cooper is arguably one of the actors of the moment, thanks to his turn in ‘Silver Linings Playbook’, but he never quite grapples with his task here.

With the action set around Schenectady, New York, the title – which refers to the Iroquois meaning given to this area – becomes clearer in the film’s final third. Fast-forwarding fifteen years, the attention turns to the offspring of Luke and Avery, as Cianfrance’s overriding theme of the sins of the father finally clicks into place. Both at high school, while Luke’s son Jason (Dane DeHaan) is the archetypal loner, Avery’s tearaway teen AJ (Emory Cohen) seems hell-bent on causing trouble just as his father is building a second career in politics.

While Avery is adamant that AJ stays away from Jason (for reasons that would give too much away here), the boys inevitably connect. That they do is one of several coincidences that Cianfrance’s plot hangs on, though if you can look past this, the finale is fuelled with an escalating, nerve-bending tension. DeHaan, who rose to prominence in ‘Chronicle’, impresses again here, as the rage-filled adolescent desperate to uncover (and even continue) his legacy.

It’s not all perfect. Eva Mendes, who appears to be following Charlize Theron in ‘Monster’ by trying to play down her looks, never fully convinces. Indeed, the female characters are little more than cut-outs – Rose Byrne’s wife to Avery might as well not exist in the film – which feels a shame, given how in tune ‘Blue Valentine’ was with its female protagonist.

Still, it’s churlish not to admire Cianfrance’s chutzpah here; like Gosling’s character, he’s a daredevil in the ring, a showman unafraid to fall. If ‘The Place Beyond The Pines’ doesn’t always fire on all cylinders, it still has moments of adrenaline-pumping brilliance.