The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)
Directed by Derek Cianfrance
A motorcycle stunt rider considers committing a crime in order to provide for his wife and child, an act that puts him on a collision course with a cop-turned-politician.
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What critics say influenced The Place Beyond the Pines
It’s reminiscent of a lot of earlier films, including “Home from the Hill,” Vincente Minnelli’s 1960 adaptation of William Humphrey’s novel, which treats some similar themes.
"The Place Beyond the Pines" is a gripping, intimate family parable whose "sins of the father" theme is vaguely reminiscent "The Godfather."
Most will be surprised and easily impressed with the film’s scope and Cianfrance’s patience as a storyteller, because most would have lost control over such an expansive tale, especially given the film’s running time and endless amount of on-screen talent, but Cianfrance somehow manages to balance it all out for a majority of the film’s time and because of that I consider The Place Beyond the Pines the year’s current best film so far and one of the single most important family dramas since The Godfather.
But Cianfrance gives interviews in which he says he’s wanted to make a “triptych” ever since he saw Abel Gance’s silent epic Napoléon.
I'm misquoting They Live By Night, the much-imitated Nicholas Ray film about the lower-depths life.
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Cinematographer Sean Bobbit (Steve McQueen’s Shame and Hunger) pulls right up alongside the cage bars and peers in, rendering the bikes abstract as they buzz by.
The Place Beyond the Pines is a much bigger canvas, and scene by scene it can be riveting, in part because of the meticulous widescreen camerawork (the d.p. this time is Sean Bobbitt, who shot Hunger and Shame for Steve McQueen) and also because of Cianfrance's sure touch with actors, who manage to rise above the ultimately thin and repetitive material.
Pines sees Cianfrance channeling The Godfather Part 2; but instead of fathers at the head of criminal dynasties separated by and echoing through the chasm of time, it’s the collision of two men and how the subsequent fallout manifests itself in their family and heirs.
Derek Cianfrance attempts a macro-micro social approach that worked well for projects such as John Sayles’s “City of Hope.”
This is, however, the kind of narrative ambition that also eluded Sean Penn (in the similar-feeling “The Indian Runner”) as well as Cianfrance’s own cinematic father figure, John Cassavetes, in his later films.
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He resembles the ill-fated heroes in Nicholas Ray pictures such as They Live by Night , On Dangerous Ground , and In a Lonely Place .
Like the nightclub singer who is blinded by the shootout in John Woo’s The Killer (1989), Romina suffers as a result of the men around her and this suffering includes being kept figuratively in the dark.