Guest Review: George On The Place Beyond The Pines

EYEWEAR'S FILM CRITIC JAMES A. GEORGE ON A GREAT AMERICAN FILM

Ryan's regrettable tattoos

Derek Cianfrance blew everyone away with Blue Valentine in 2010. A raw and painfully accurate story of a couple’s love and love loss. Despite shattering me, it was my favourite film of the year. The Place Beyond The Pines is his follow up, this time exploring a wider spectrum of relationships within family, particularly fathers and sons and the legacy they can leave.

The lengthy opening shot channels the American master directors, Scorsese, Welles & P. T. Anderson, informing us that what we are about to see is of such calibre; an endeavour as cocky as it is noble. The film is an emotional epic triptych that doesn’t buckle under its own weight, if sometimes doing all but signpost its own structure. The film fizzles out a little towards the end, but our interest is already with the characters, we want to know the outcome even if we have spotted it a mile away. This is testament to the remarkably harsh and honest emotions and humans living before us – something that can be said about only too few film characters.

Filmmakers sometimes forget that humans do stupid things. Things that don’t make sense; people don’t always react to situation A with situation B, in troubled times quite often situation X is the route taken – not grounded in logic but something truer. Ryan Gosling plays Luke. We first see Luke playing with a butterfly knife held out by his washboard abs, covered in regrettable tattoos. The man is impulsive and reckless, his masculinity two-dimensional. Since the array of characters is as vast as the plot, visual clues like these aren’t wasted. With no hyperbole, every performance is stellar, Eva Mendes, Bradley Cooper, Ray Liotta, Ben Mendelsohn, too many to name. Even Rose Byrne’s brief screen time presents a capsule of a living, breathing life.

Sean Bobbitt’s work as cinematographer here is as astute as ever, the mood of the image marrying the story perfectly. As does Mike Patton’s brooding soundtrack, foreboding and beautiful, woven into some moments of exquisite editing.

The Place Beyond The Pines isn’t perfect, it meanders at points, and the first two thirds of the film outshine the rest, but moments of greatness are definitely throughout. This film is for the patient and those looking for an engaging and soulful experience will not be disappointed. And while the critic in me found the last moments of the film quite hammering, I – for the first time in a cinema for almost three years – all at once felt my belly tighten, my shoulders jolt and my cheeks dampen with tears.

A poem for my mother, July 15 When she was dying And I was in a different country I dreamt I was there with her Flying over the ocean very quickly, And arriving in the room like a dream And I was a dream, but the meaning was more Than a dream has – it was a moving over time And land, over water, to get love across Fast enough, to be there, before she died, To lean over the small, huddled figure, In the dark, and without bothering her Even with apologies, and be a kiss in the air, A dream of a kiss, or even less, the thought of one, And when I woke, none of this had happened, She was still far distant, and we had not spoken.

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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