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The Place Beyond the Pine becomes two films, and does so quite simply by creating a story that reaches an appropriate point to make the shift, setting up two very different halves to one film.
Luke Glanton is a struggling stunt rider, who after finding out he has a son tries to settle down and provide a life. Struggling to do so, Luke turns to robbing banks in order to give his son a better life. As Luke grows more and more daring, his life is inevitably put at risk changing the lives of everyone involved.
Having billable stars like Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper is an asset to any film, especially a film that knows to present them both as the top star when necessary. Cooper and Gosling play vastly different characters, on opposite sides of the law and opposite sides of the film. The first half being about Gosling and his descent into chaos and robbery and how that affected the life of his son, the life of the people around. The second half being about Cooper’s character and how one traumatic event can change a cop’s life, whether it be at home or at work. Ultimately The Place Beyond the Pines becomes a film about loss and gain and how one get both from a particular situation depending on what side we are on.
It is at times a messy film; some of the action is blurry and almost gives you a headache. Those scenes are a total misfire for a film that was so dependent on ramping up the intensity for the characters involved. It also became messy during the third act, when it became a generational piece about one person struggles can span generations and have an effect on their children without even really realizing it does. It becomes sloppy in its transition from bank heist film, to hero cop film, to lonely teenager film. The bad part is, it never needed to be sloppy, clocking in at 140 minutes it had enough time to transition well and place all the meaningful scenes where they needed to be. Yes, there were meaningful scenes in all three acts, but most of them came in the first two, which made the third a tad tedious and too ambitious to drive home the overall point of the film.
This is not to say the film is bad, Dane DeHaan is great in the third act. His desperation, lack of ambition and eventual self destruction were well executed by the young actor but they came during a too little too late period of the film, when all the potential poignancy this film had to offer had already been delivered. We understood the struggles the family went through, the struggles Cooper’s character went through and so when DeHaan got his chance to shine it was all just second-hand and merely identical to the same struggles and emotions that were dealt with in the first act.
It is still a very enjoyable and real film, which is very emotional at times. It just never sacrifices it’s overzealous ambition to tell a better story, or to simply refine what was already a story worth telling.
8/10
