The Place Beyond the Pines

Thank you Dan for another challenge - and let me add to it:  For every post we put on this blog, consider also posting that piece somewhere else.  This is, of course, another backwards invite to Anne to share some of her other blog material with the symposians, but it can work for all of us - make your own blog, or post something on a school site, or write a letter to the paper.  For my “poem” of the day (the last six not quite making the Plath cut), I am offering a movie review, and this one I will post on IMDb.com.   (And thanks Dan, too, for telling me about this movie in the first place.)

The Place Beyond the Pines (2012).  Derek Cianfrance, Director and cowriter; featuring Brad Cooper, Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes and Emory Cohen.  Rated 8 out of 10.

This is a movie about fathers and sons.  There are all too brief glimpses of wives, a mother, a daughter/sister and a stepfather —the last painted with broad strokes to be a strong character but, sadly, never fully developed —but there are three stories in this film that come together and share the theme brilliantly: an elder father and his impressionable adult son; that son, years later, and his prodigal child; and another father and son who barely, yet indelibly, get to know one another.  It would be enough, perhaps, to have just one of these stories.  The first one, of a judge who steers his son into politics in a do or die moment, hints at an L.A. Confidential plot, and while the direction and writing are not quite of the same caliber, this story has its own intrigue.  The second, of a son who divorces and pursues a public career and all but forgets his own child and his father’s example, is also compelling and well acted by veteran Brad Cooper and newcomer Emory Cohen.  The third, of a son who grew up not knowing his father and a father who lived and died thinking only of his son, is the most wrenching of the stories, and this one, too, with motorcycle and money motifs, scenes from the circus and parries into the worlds of crime and drugs, could stand alone.  But instead we get the stories in the form of a triptych.

Triptychs (Greek for threefold) are usually considered in the artistry of paintings (e.g. Hieronymus Bosch) or photography, with three panels presented side by side, but the term can also apply to films in which three separable plotlines are offered.  And what better way to consider this theme?  After all, we who are fathers are also sons, and we fathers and sons will always be in parallel with others who walk the same path.  This could, of course, get quite profound (the either/or dilemma of Abraham, Isaac, God and all future generations comes to mind) or muddled (see Bosch’s depictions of Hell) and in the world of film triptychs could quickly trip up on the trickery of it, but The Place Beyond the Pines manages to make it work, maybe because it is neither as deep as Kierkegaard nor as detail heavy as the paintings of Bosch.  There is not a complicated weave, and we are not bogged down with imagery or allusions or heavy thought: we are simply given three examples, side by side, of the instance and pull of the father and son relationship.

There is more I would have liked to have seen in this film.  I mentioned the stepfather.  I could also complain about some of the pacing or a few plot contrivances or some of the unoriginality of the direction.  What prevails, though, is the way the film captures the fundamentals of its theme: the duty of fathers, the humanness of sons and the destinies we struggle to find.