No Escape

Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper

Class is like fate, unavoidable, inescapable. At least this seems to be the case in twenty-first century USA. In Derek Cianfrance’s moving The Place beyond the Pines that weaves the stories of two men and their sons in a linear yet entrancing manner, this is the message that holds the movie together and down. Those born blue collar remain blue collar or die trying to escape their destiny.

Schenectady, New York is the small town chosen to represent the thousands like it that are rusting around the United States. It is the place beyond the pines, its Mohawk name, another people vanished by greed and prejudice.  Like in Blue Valentine, Cianfrance’s other blue collar movie about loss of dreams, also starring Ryan Gosling, the characters in the movie feel true, despite the fact that we are watching two of the most beautiful male actors around today, battling their destiny.

The strength of the movie lies in the acting and the narrative, which wanes a little towards the end, when it goes into the third of this three-act movie. Ryan Gosling plays like James Dean, tough on the outside while wounded and well-meaning. Gosling is very good as the motorcycle stunt driver in a run-down travelling fair, a naïve dreamer who stumbles onto something worth living for.  He is similar, though less cynical and smart, than his character in Drive.

Ben Mendelsohn is great as a sort of mixture between enabling guardian angel and has-been partner in crime. This Australian actor is certainly one to watch for, in the vein of Gary Oldman, whom he played alongside in Nolan’s Dark Night Rises. Even before that movie he had proven his worth in David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, as one of the Cody brothers.

Ben Mendelsohn in A Place Beyond the Pines

Bradley Cooper has certainly already proven he can be an actor of substance with his role in The Silver Linings Playbook, and once again shows how much more he is than the shallow good looking guy he keeps playing in the Hangover series. His character, more than the others, is the one that evidences that even the best intentions are derailed by fate and class, or both.

It’s too bad that the women in the movie, played by Eva Mendes and Rose Byrne, are quite so secondary to the plot and their men.  We don’t really get to feel much of anything towards their characters, probably because the men they love don’t either. Even Ray Liotta stands out more, playing the crooked, racist man to hate he has perfected in movies like Goodfellas or Cop Land.

The three stories presented end up being pretty movie-like, but the backdrop is not.  It is what makes the movie plausible. Cianfrance is showing the America where dreams are dying, one underclass at a time. A place where sons can’t seem to escape the sins of their fathers, or their place in the world. A country where the true black-hearted criminals end up shielded by society’s institutions gone bad. A place beyond the pines where every-day, ordinary people are trapped like the caged motorcycle drivers in rundown fairs.