The Death of American Tragedy // "The Place Beyond the Pines" Movie Review

 

A criticism I usually level against film dramas I see is that they too often have a happy ending.  Not that happy endings are bad in and of themselves, or that I want to be depressed every time I walk out of a movie house.  But the ending of a film should somehow match the trajectory, and overall mood, of the story it tells.  Some of the hallmark American films of the last fifty years have endings that are brutally unhappy, or at least ambiguous.  The Pawn Broker, Bonny and Clyde, The Godfather I and II, to name just a few, all end on decidedly down notes.  Even The Exorcist, where the devil is defeated, makes you question what cost is necessary to overcome evil.  We think of the original Rocky as an uplifting movie, but remember, our hero loses the big fight; his is a more subtle triumph.  Repeatedly since I've put on my amateur movie critic hat have I walked out of a theater shaking my head because I felt like a film didn't pull the trigger on the logical, and possibly more meaningful, ending that would have also been less than happy.  The latest on my list of "couldn't go all the way with it" movies is The Place Beyond the Pines.  

The Place Beyond the Pines tells a story in three distinct acts, each focusing on a different set of characters who are interrelated either by blood or chance.  Ryan Gosling plays a motorcycle stunt rider who quits the county fair circuit and settles in Schenectady, New York when he finds out he has a son there he hadn't previously known about.  He turns to a life of crime when he can't support the child on his meager mechanic's pay.  He attempts one job too many, with everything that could go wrong going terribly so, ending with a confrontation with a rookie police officer played by Bradly Cooper.  The story then shifts to Cooper, and the struggles he has balancing his ambition to move up the ranks while staying clean from the corruption in his own department.  The final act follows Gosling and Cooper's sons fifteen years later, both the same age, who, unknowing of their fathers' previous history, meet in high school.  The one constant is Eva Mendes who plays the mother of Gosling's son.

Each of these people are a mixture of good intentions and fatal flaws in the best tradition of Shakespeare.  Gosling wants to be a good father, but his impetuousness leads him to bad choice after bad choice, further alienating him from the people he is trying to draw into his life.  Cooper made a choice to follow a police career, against his politically connected  family's wishes.  While he likes to play the humble civil servant, his eyes are on a bigger prize.  It's hard to tell sometimes if, though not without a conscience, in a way he isn't just as bent as the crooked cops he goes after.  Their sons, played by Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen, seem almost switched at birth.  DeHaan, though mixed up with selling drugs, is a brooding, thoughtful kid who wonders about the motorcycling father he never met.  Cohen, though a child of privilege, comes off as a brutish street kid, lacking his father's smarts and sensitivity.  Unlike a Shakespearean tragedy all doesn't end in tears.  DeHaan's future is left somewhat open to conjecture, but his final confrontation with Cooper and his son amounts to nothing more than a pair of muddy trousers and a bump on the head.  Cooper even reaches the top of his profession in spite of some very public embarrassments.  The Bard would have had none of this.

I think of The Place Beyond the Pines as somewhat Shakespearean in spite of it's very American setting because the focus is so much on the personal choices of the characters leading to tragic endings.  American tragedies, especially since the "New Hollywood" period of the '60's and '70's tend to present people up against an unfair system out to control them or else destroy them if they refused to conform.  While both principles are at work here, none of these people can really blame their troubles on "the Man," with the possible exception of Eva Mendes, who is at the mercy of self seeking men the whole way through. This is a movie that tells its story in a meandering, roundabout way, which made it's somewhat foggy, half upbeat resolution make me wonder all the more what exactly the point was supposed to be.  Shakespeare rendered rich, psychologically complex characters who acted in conflicted, sometimes muddled ways.  But their actions always had clear consequences.  Here the lesson seems to be that you can make the wrong choices consistently, and, for one character at least, still get the prize in the end.  This is not gained by manipulation, or the victory an unfair system or personal corruption winning out in the end.  It happens simply because we don't want people leaving the theater sad, and that's simply not a very good reason to be artistically dishonest. 

I don't want to give the wrong impression; The Place Beyond the Pines is not without sadness and loss, but this shouldn't have ended happy for anyone.  Not because happy endings are bad, but because sad ones can teach us a lesson, and this one represents a lost opportunity.