The thunder and the fury of The Place Beyond the… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

The thun­der and the fury of The Place Beyond the Pines

18 Apr 2023

Words by Gayle Sequeira

A person wearing a red jacket and motorcycle helmet stands beside a motorcycle in a wooded area.
A person wearing a red jacket and motorcycle helmet stands beside a motorcycle in a wooded area.
A decade since its release, Derek Cian­france’s thriller about the inter­sect­ing lives of two young men in small-town Amer­i­ca still stings.

The image of a bike recurs through­out The Place Beyond The Pines, a sprawl­ing yet inti­mate, decade-span­ning trip­tych of crime and pun­ish­ment, choice and con­se­quence, and how the sins of the father must even­tu­al­ly come to bear on the son. A shot of three stunt motor­cy­cle stunt­men rac­ing inside a sphere, the cam­era zoom­ing in on the rid­ers until they’re one indis­tinct blur, could be read as a visu­al metaphor for how easy it is to become yet anoth­er face­less, replace­able cog in the machine. The fren­zy of a bank robber’s escape as he zips through traf­fic becomes a short win­dow of insight into his bare­ly sup­pressed inner tur­moil. A bike glid­ing out of frame at the end of the film rep­re­sents the hard-won free­dom of a new life.

Most of all, this motif comes to illus­trate how tough it can be to ulti­mate­ly escape from cycles of pain and vio­lence, how mis­guid­ed attempts to speed ahead only set some­one on the road to ruin, and how the com­pul­sion to ride like the wind is inex­tri­ca­ble from the fear that you’re get­ting nowhere.

The ques­tion of what it means to be a man has gird­ed the works of Derek Cian­france and Dar­ius Marder, whose films exam­ine the con­struct of mas­culin­i­ty through char­ac­ters who strug­gle to live up to a self-imposed def­i­n­i­tion of it. Their col­lab­o­ra­tions, The Place Beyond The Pines (which Cian­france direct­ed and co-wrote with Marder), and Sound of Met­al (which Marder direct­ed and Cian­france has a sto­ry co-cred­it on), fea­ture men simul­ta­ne­ous­ly dri­ven by the need to care for their part­ners, and hob­bled by their finan­cial inabil­i­ty to. Both Riz Ahmed’s Ruben Stone and Ryan Gosling’s Luke Glan­ton are caught between the crush­ing weight of their per­ceived inad­e­qua­cy and the yearn­ing to rise above it, to do and be bet­ter for the peo­ple they care about.

Both films open with their pro­tag­o­nists prepar­ing for a show­case of their tal­ents. But while Sound of Met­al places us inside Ruben’s head by let­ting us see the antic­i­pa­tion on his face in the buildup to a con­cert, The Place Beyond The Pines begins with car­ni­val stunt rid­er Luke’s head out of frame. Only his bare tor­so and tat­toos are on dis­play as the metal­lic flick­ing of a switch­blade inside his trail­er con­trasts against the cheery sounds of the fair outside.

As he cuts his way through a swathe of peo­ple, his back is to the cam­era. This min­i­miza­tion of his iden­ti­ty con­tin­ues as he finds him­self edged out of his son’s life — rather than tell him about the child he fathered the last time the last time he was in town, his part­ner Romi­na Gutier­rez (Eva Mendes) has set­tled down with anoth­er man, Kofi Kan­cam (Maher­sha­la Ali), whose finances make him a much more sta­ble prospect.

Man with brown hair sitting at a desk in an office

Cianfrance’s empa­thet­ic lens doesn’t judge Romi­na for her choic­es; it’s clear that her heart and head are at odds with each oth­er and in the mean­time, Luke can only watch help­less­ly from afar as Kofi is able to give his son the kind of life that he can’t. This self-doubt creeps into his soul — when Romi­na asks if he wants to hold his son for the first time, he rubs his hands togeth­er first, as if to not only scrub off their grime, but whol­ly trans­form him­self into some­one deserv­ing of cradling a child. In a lat­er scene, Luke fol­lows Romi­na and Kofi into church and dis­cov­ers that they’re bap­tiz­ing his son with­out hav­ing informed him first or even invit­ing him to be a part of the rit­u­al. As he watch­es anoth­er man take his place at a piv­otal part of his child’s upbring­ing, he can only weep in humiliation.

For some­one who just wants to be seen and acknowl­edged, how­ev­er, Luke’s only option is to take to a pro­fes­sion that requires him to be anony­mous — bank rob­bery. In this way, The Place Beyond The Pines con­sid­ers who gets to be seen and heard, spot­light­ed or for­got­ten. Dur­ing a get­away attempt, Luke is ulti­mate­ly killed by police­man Avery Cross (Bradley Coop­er), whose actions bring him fame and news cov­er­age. As Avery takes on a more pub­lic pro­file, he con­tin­ues to remain pri­vate­ly haunt­ed by his past mis­deeds. In con­trast to Luke, Cian­france frames him through tight close­ups — this is a man for whom the spot­light has now begun to resem­ble the uncom­fort­able glare of a microscope.

Through the con­trast­ing tra­jec­to­ries of Luke and Avery — one dies vil­lainized by the media, the oth­er becomes a local hero — the film builds up the sim­i­lar­i­ties between them. Like Luke, Avery’s ambi­tions exceed his reach, which push­es him to devise an alter­nate path to them; in his case, lever­ag­ing the police force’s shame­ful secrets to cat­a­pult him­self to the posi­tion of assis­tant dis­trict attor­ney. Like Luke, he falls short of pro­vid­ing his son with an ide­al upbring­ing. Despite the dif­fer­ences in where they’ve come from and all the ways their paths have diverged, their chil­dren end up in the same place, as if all part of some ill-fat­ed grand design or Greek tragedy.

Cian­france isn’t inter­est­ed in pithy moral lessons about how crime doesn’t pay or how short­cuts often lead straight to dead ends. For all its propul­sive ener­gy, the film finds poignan­cy in its qui­eter moments — in a woman whose face crum­ples in despair when the momen­tary fan­ta­sy of a new life is by crushed by the real­i­ty of her cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, in strangers who share a look of mutu­al respect while rac­ing along­side each oth­er in the woods, in the bowed head of a pen­i­tent man whose sins have final­ly caught up with him. It takes on sys­temic and insti­tu­tion­al rot, but stays focused on the lives of these men, ask­ing us to think about what we’d do for the peo­ple we love, how our actions might shape those who come after us, and how we’d like to be remembered.

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