Reviews & Ratings for
The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)

Amazing film. A bit slow thought but it get to your nerves anyhow. The cinematography was spectacular, the performances were high energy, and I loved the writing. A very close character study of two men, and what it means to be a man. Absolutely perfect, and I highly recommend everyone sees this film.
Thank you

In 1997, Luke Glanton is a motorcycle stuntman with a traveling carnival. In Schenectady, he meets his ex-lover Romina Gutierrez, who is now with another man, Kofi Kancam. Luke discovers that he unknowingly fathered Romina's baby Jason the previous year. He leaves the carnival to stay near mother and son.

The film's first part centres on Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), a charismatic biker doing a dangerous wall-of-death stunt act at a travelling fair. He's a strutting, chain-smoking, much tattooed drifter who is transformed by the discovery that he's the father of Jason, the six-month-old son of Romina (Eva Mendes), a waitress in a suburban Schenectady cafe. In order to be near his son he gives up his transient life and takes a poorly paid job with a rural car repair shop run by the roughneck Robin (Ben Mendelsohn). He remains in touch with the world of reckless speed, and to supplement his income he agrees to rob local banks using his remarkable skills as a biker and drifts into petty crime. The film catches the romance of speed but doesn't glamorise crime. Romina has found a new, more dependable partner, and Luke remains violent, wilful and lawless. He's redeemed in the eyes of the audience, but not in those of society, by the way he tries to assume paternal responsibilities.

For the third part of the triptych, Cianfrance leaps forward 15 years. By then, Avery (for reasons we can easily infer) has broken up with his adoring wife, moved into his distinguished father's modest mansion and is running for the high office of attorney general of New York. At this point the focus shifts to Luke's son, Jason, and Avery's son, AJ, their circumstances unknown to each other and both highly disturbed. In a contrived and perfunctory way they suddenly become high-school classmates in their senior year, and the sins of the fathers are visited on them when they're in trouble with the authorities as consumers and dealers of drugs. This is the least interesting and the least convincing part of the story. But it is obviously significant to Cianfrance and his co-writers in the way it draws together the themes of masculinity, fatherhood, personal responsibility, inheritance and fate that underlie their merging of American family epic and Greek tragedy. Not for nothing are the sons called Jason and AJ (presumably Ajax), and before they meet AJ has been languishing in the nearby New York township of Troy.