![]() It’s impossible to discuss The Place Beyond the Pines in any detail without revealing that it’s really three movies in one (building upon Blue Valentine’s entwined-twofer gimmick), abruptly tossing the narrative baton from Luke to Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), a rookie beat cop who ends up wrestling with a similar kind of fatherly anxiety but from a more privileged vantage point. The mouth-breathing exertions of a moody misfit to impress his baby mama and prove he’s not a loser makes for a pretty thin feature film, but Cianfrance has conceived his sophomore effort as an epic. Regarding his son with that ice-blue thousand-yard stare, Luke might be trying to see whether there’s any of him in there or Gosling might be trying to remember his lines (although, as in Drive, he’s been given a bare minimum of dialogue). Luke’s fears about setting a bad example for his young son turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but where Gosling’s anguish about doing badly by his young daughter in Blue Valentine was that movie’s most affecting feature, here the actor seems locked into a caricatured pantomime of paternity. ![]() That this plan eventually involves picking up gigs as a bank robber suggests that Luke’s ideas about maturity have a decidedly adolescent tinge, and if The Place Beyond the Pines has a theme-answer: yes, yes it does-it’s the struggle to distinguish between different models of masculinity. Introduced striding purposefully through the fairground where he plies his death-defying trade as a stunt cyclist, Gosling’s “Handsome” Luke Glanton is the proverbial bad boy with a heart of (fool’s) gold after learning that the sexy townie (Eva Mendes) he’d slept with during his troupe’s last annual visit has quietly given birth to his son, he resolves to change his ways and become a dependable dad, though he doesn’t seem to own any clothing other than the t-shirts he always wears inside-out. By toggling between idealized scenes of naïve puppy love and long calcified regret and resentment, he surely meant to provide a well-rounded portrait of a troubled marriage, but the movie felt more like a hybrid highlight/blooper reel-a network of raw nerves in search of connective tissue.Ĭianfrance’s new drama, The Place Beyond the Pines, tries both tacks with its star, casting him in a part that’s eerily similar to his Drive cipher-he’s a taciturn gear-head who worships his motorcycle rather than his racecar-while also hypothetically affording him the opportunity to flex his thespian muscles. ![]() But it also exposed Cianfrance as a filmmaker who thinks in short cuts. Blue Valentine was spacious as an actor’s showcase, despite the film’s ironclad formal structure, which was to regularly juxtapose the happy beginning of its central couple’s courtship with its painful death throes-a quasi-Pinteresque conceit that generated precisely the sort of prefab pathos it was designed for. The exception to this tendency was writer-director Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, which gave Gosling plenty of chances to stamp, holler, and run his hands through an artificially thinned hairline as a house painter whose marriage to his high school sweetheart (Michelle Williams) is falling apart. Either way, he doesn’t appear to be lifting a finger. This pale-rider quality was built into the hero-without-a-name conceit of Drive, which photographed its star like an impassive religious icon-or maybe a designer hood ornament-but even when cast as a silver-tongued charmer in Crazy, Stupid, Love or a hard-driving spin doctor in The Ides of March, Gosling has practiced the sort of acting in which slow-burning intensity is indistinguishable from catatonic paralysis. Has Ryan Gosling become the least surprising actor in American movies? Notwithstanding his post-Mouseketeer breakthrough as a Jewish neo-Nazi in The Believer, the chiseled Ontarian has steadily blanched out his actorly palette at this point he’s cornered the market on blankness. ![]()
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