As my partner-in-grit Bill Boyle pointed out in casual conversation, director Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines ("Pines") is a book on screen. Not to get it twisted, this film isn't based on any specific piece of literature. It's an original script by Cianfrance, Ben Coccio and Darius Marder. What Bill meant - I think - is the super-ambitious bigness of it all. Big themes, big chronology, big picture. And I totally agree. Pines lays out like an homunculan arm, bones split at the joints and skin stretched from heart to hands. Sweeping and sprawling, and probably better-suited for a proper thesis. Thoughtfully, I won't betray the bigness with a crammed review, but instead, I'll bruise my knuckles a little against some of the finer points.
From there, the flick takes a turn and, without giving much away, Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper) enters frame and fray, as a still-green lawyer turned patrol cop and the son of a local judge (played by the always wonderful Harris Yulin). Avery's story takes over, constantly shadowed by the day he came up against it with Luke, and soiled relationships with wife, kid, and crooked police buddies. Branded a hero and marked for measure by dirty detective DeLuca (Ray Liotta) and crew in an evidence-room drug scheme, Avery can't wrap a grip around the corruption and turns on the force, exchanging his badge for a post as assistant district attorney. Cianfrance jumps ahead in time to find Avery running for State Attorney General and his fuck-up teenage son, AJ (Emory Cohen), befriending Luke's son, Jason (Dane DeHaan). And I won't tell you the rest.
Pines is about many things, like happenstance and circumstance, pressures and priorities, haves and have-nots, sons, sinners and scum. It's also about moving forward and looking back because fate finger-fucks the future. Cianfrance treats us to a long tracking shot through the carnival and into Luke's cycle cage, then a sick and slick chase in the streets and cemetery, through the cop car window, watching Luke speed forward as we follow. And in bouncing handheld action, Avery and Luke cross paths, the ambiguity of the moment staged to perfection. Then, Cianfrance flips tact and we get Avery backing out of the forest when he figures DeLuca's got a killing plan, guilt gilding Avery's political rise, and seeing him back to the pines as an absentee dad and force of fearlessness.
Not sure I'd call it a great film (sorry, Bill), but it's very, very good. Even excellent if I'm pushed to say so. There's so much being explored that almost two and half hours of it is doesn't seem enough to fully realize Cianfrance's vision. Like The Godfather, operatic epics sometimes need multiple manifestations, even the overrated ones (I'm just all blasphemous now). Maybe Pines isn't fitted for a three-movie saga, but it's thematically spanning with a true cinematic claw that takes hold, despite the sputtering final act.
