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| Driver-to-biker. |
Like a badly written telenovela.
Derek Cianfrance’s (Blue Valentine) The Place Beyond the Pines is a three-movies-in-one epic tale that spans two generations.
The first chapter of this 2.5-hour triptych is eerily reminiscent of Winding-Refn's Drive that you’ll find yourself double-checking IMDB if Winding-Refn and Cianfrance collaborated a sequel. But, no. Startlingly, instead of driving a car, a quietly violent Ryan Gosling is a biker here named Luke, traveling long winding roads with a Drive-like soundtrack, impressing you with his stunts and speed, gazing in the distance with a pained expression, stalking a woman (Eva Mendes) and her child, and then, with such coincidence, ends up thieving. It’s almost a carbon-copy of Drive, with Gosling just looking dirty here, comically costumed with doodle-like tattoos and a cheap-blonde hair.
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| Bradley Cooper is the star of Chapter 2. |
Then Luke’s story merges with Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), a young, ambitious cop riding the flow of lies and corruption in the police department—which brings us to Chapter 2 of the movie solely focused on him. Predictably, Chapter 3 of this saga gets the two lead stars’ children together for more dramatic conflict.
The main problem of this lengthy movie is its lack of character motivation. We see them moving in the screen, flawed, immoral, passionate, and violent, doing their thing—yet their motivations are murky. The cause-and-effect is clear, yet the characters do not reveal a deeper motivation for their actions. So you stop caring. Fake tragic photos on Facebook that demands your “like” and “share” can evoke even more emotions than this film. As if this film is written to show events and not tell a real story. Like a newspaper report devoid of human interest. As if the writers didn't know how to end Gosling’s story so they were forced to create Cooper’s story, and then they got inspired to write the last chapter, stitching them together just for the sake of making a movie.
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| The final chapter. |
The Place Beyond the Pines’ only value is the performance of the cast, with Cianfrance’s impressive skill in bringing out his actors’ most realistic and natural performances—which we saw in his better, much more solidly-written Blue Valentine.
1 out of 5 stars
Opens in the Philippines on June 26, 2013, in selected theaters.
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