Then, at the end, he prolongs the drama with a colossal fourth act-cum-coda that gives us redemption and narrative closure. That might have been the moral, but it does not do justice to the controlled unreadability of Cianfrance's film. Maleness, pig-headed, self-destructive maleness, recurs eternally – an original sin bubbling irrepressibly to the surface. Like Luke, his moment of utter desolation, his anti-epiphany, centres on a baby: an act of intimation and larceny involves going to a suspect's house and picking a baby up out of its crib.Īnd what does this all mean? For around three-quarters of the movie, Cianfrance leaves it open-ended and a little mysterious, with a sense of life rolling inexorably on, as it always must, and generation succeeding to generation, bearing genetic scars and liable always to repeat the sins of the fathers in a Groundhog Day of eternal dismay. But instead of quitting the police force when he had the ideal opportunity, Avery sticks stubbornly with it, out of a need to spite his overbearing dad, and ironically gets mired in police corruption initiated by a brutal officer, Deluca, played by Ray Liotta. His boy's honourable wound is pure political gold. ![]() He is at once humiliated and moved.īradley Cooper's Avery, on the other hand, appears first as a fresh-faced officer (the youthful face is a digital enhancement) who is injured, but not permanently or seriously, in the line of duty, to the not-so-secret satisfaction of his father, a district attorney who yearns for his well-educated son to leave the rough business of police work and become a politician. Poor Luke, his machismo utterly battered, resolves to quit the fair and stick around, earning money any way he can, and Gosling has a superb scene in which he sneaks into the church where her baby is being christened: a shabby loser among these aspirational people. Luke is sullenly displeased to hear that she now has a new partner and child impulsively showing up at her place the next day to say goodbye, he is greeted at the door by Romina's elderly mother, Malena (Olga Merediz), who tells him something she shouldn't. After doing a show in a town where the fair had played the previous year, he is astonished to notice one of his former conquests, Romina (Eva Mendes), hanging around, apparently wanting to say hi – but weirdly reserved and showing no great need to rekindle the relationship. He is Luke, the itinerant stunt rider who moves with a travelling fair from town to town, enjoying one-night stands and a sad kind of small-scale celebrity. Gosling gives his most open and engaging performance yet, his sleepy, woozy mannerisms developing into a complex interior world of hurt, resentment and disappointment. ![]() Watch the trailer for The Place Beyond the Pines StudioCanal
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