FILM The Place Beyond The Pines
(15) 140mins
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Ryan Gosling is scintillating as bad boy Luke but it's downhill from there in an eloquent but overcooked look at the sins of our fathers.
REVIEW
Aaargh! What a waste! What a crime! What a frustrating loss of faith and confidence in something rammed to the gills with cinematic potential.
This ambitious film, from Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance, starts out brilliantly. Lean, taut, sexy with complex emotions and motives hinted by a look and a mumbled word.
But check out that running time. How can a tight film last so long?
Because it has a nervous breakdown, that's why. It starts jabbering.
This collapse comes in three distinct stages because the film is in three distinct chapters. Chapter one is exhilarating. Itinerant fairground stunt rider Luke (Ryan Gosling) returns to a town to find out the year before he sired a child (via Eva Mendes).
The drifter decides to settle down and do well by his boy. He finds robbing a bank is about the only thing he can do, beyond riding a bike.
His chapter closes with the arrival of policeman Avery (Bradley Cooper) and their lives clash and collide in ways that ripple down the years.
The lawyer-turned-cop - also a new father - wants to be one of the lads (a corrupt gang that includes a greasily impressive Ray Liotta) but he has an eye on the main chance. He's not above looking after No.1 as he heads for a life in politics but that means subsuming guilt over his own misdeeds and screwing over the sleazeballs.
If Luke is honestly stupid, Avery is dishonestly smart.
Years later, their two boys, inevitably, find each other. Are they fated to repeat the sins of their fathers?
The film should have left it there, hanging, allowing us to join the dots. Instead, it hammers home the point, time and time again, relentlessly, and in case you don't get the message, Cianfrance tries another way, like we're thick or something.
Then, when you're think he's done and We've Learnt Our Lesson - he goes again. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he showed up at my front door, jabbed a finger against my forehead yelling: "Got it yet, Broadbent, you dumbass?" in a range of languages and dialects to cover all eventualities.
As much as the first reel is an object lesson in intelligent minimalism, the last section is bloated, lazy and utterly, infuriatingly unnecessary.
My advice: When you see the kids meet for the first time at the school dinner table, make your excuses and preserve the memory of something rather special.
Aaargh!
