The Place beyond the Pines **** Derek Cianfrance teams up for a second time with Ryan Gosling in this spectacularly raw and well acted three act drama.

Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine(2010)depicted Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as a couple in marital collapse. Blue Valentine was undeniably a film that was driven by the extremely genuine and overwrought performances of the actors over the manoeuvrings of the plot. The Place beyond the Pines is, however, much more of an elaborate and masterful return for Cianfrance.

Ryan Gosling plays Luke Glanton, a stunt-biker who discovers, after a brief former relationship with Romina, (Eva Mendes) that he is the father to an infant son. Gosling’s character subsequently wants to fulfil his paternal requirements; however, he fails to earn enough money on the right side of the law to provide for his child and instead, turns to robbing banks. Meanwhile Avery Cross played by Bradley Cooper, (who is also the father to an infant) is an esteemed police officer whose endeavour to track Luke down ends up providing him with ethical problems within the police profession that even infiltrate into the bloodlines of these intrinsic central characters. The film is in the vein of mythical tragedies and has to be understood as a drama of archetypal consequences. At the centre of The Place beyond the Pines is a biblical and well-worn literary idea of the sins of the father being visited upon the son. Within these father-son threads, concepts such as fate and retribution play out in a drama controlled by a powerful imperium of divine intervention and poetic justice with powerful effect.

Gosling gives a particularly sincere, charismatic and conflicted performance, however, it is Bradley Cooper that is the real revelation. He portrays Avery’s tortured guilt with a raw understated conviction intensified by Cianfrance’s intimate shot style used with such claustrophobic effect in Blue Valentine. Cooper essentially plays a character that is haunted by his actions and spirals into a web of duplicity incited effectively by Ray Liotta’s character.( Liotta incidentally, in paradigmatic slime-ball mode.) Both Cooper and Gosling’s characters are reflections of good and bad, however, these binary oppositions are clearly not determined by lawful ideologies and end up becoming deliberately distorted to portray a greater moral point. In the second act of the film, the word hero is emphasised, but the context in which the word is used does not ring true and is consciously intended not to. Cianfrance is allowing the audience to question both Avery’s heroism that is placed upon him in conjunction to Glanton’s crimes. The latter may perversely resemble the acts of a more genuinely heroic figure.

The final act of the film occurs 15 years later and deals with the lives of the children. In a strange and archetypally contrived twist of fate, both Luke and Avery’s sons become friends at high school and the repercussive effect of their father’s wrongdoings end up revisiting them in the drama. Although this act is the weaker and baggier of the films three act tragic structure, it does actually deal with some of the moral problems created by the parents that percolate into teenagers lives such as excessive hedonism, drink/drugs quite effectively. Drink, drugs and debauchery would seem the more natural vices that would percolate from the threads of hereditary sin and manifest within the boys as a sort of moral decay.

The Place beyond the Pines is an intensely riveting and darkly dramatic experience that must be understood as a modern mythical tale, fable or allegory about the looming effects and reprecussions of moral and lawful transgressions. The 'beyond' of the film's title possibly alludes to a greater, more prophetic arbiter of judgement.