In Which It Is A Vicious Cycle Really

Can't Start A Fire Without A Face Tattoo

by SHELBY SHAW 
 
The Place Beyond the Pines  
dir. Derek Cianfrance
140 minutes

The opening scene of The Place Beyond The Pines is a long take travelling from inside a trailer to inside a metal cage of death, three stunt motorcyclists speeding in arcs of physical defiance around one another. This is their job, day in and day out, from city to city. They are entertainers, risk-takers, vagabonds. They thrill to please for a few hours’ time until they make their long-awaited return the next year.

Like clichéd rock stars without any of the status or benefits or names, this is the never-ending cycle – albeit an unpredictable one set amidst a predictable string of domestic cities – in which Luke (Ryan Gosling) thrives.

The traditional tattoos adorning Luke’s blonde and innocently tough demeanor were co-designed by Gosling and Ben Shields, and all of them are fake – but that didn’t stop Gosling from telling director Derek Cianfrance that he felt like the face tattoo he originally insisted on, a small dagger with a drop of blood, was a tad overboard. “That's what happens when you get a face tattoo. You regret it and now you have to regret it for the whole movie,” Cianfrance had replied. And so we have our theme: living in post, dealing with past, coping in the present and seeming fine.

In Schenectady (which translates roughly from Mohawk to “the place beyond the pines”) Romina (Eva Mendes) cares for Luke’s unknown-to-him son, Jason. When Cianfrance reveals this, he lets the camera linger past the moment, Romina's mother Malena (Olga Merediz) eagerly offering Luke to Jason. He gravely cradles the baby, protective and proud and determined; he is quickly becoming a father in the doorway between entering Romina and Jason’s life and the porch that will lead Luke back to the carnival, back to leaving again for at least another year.

Romina is either always crying or trying to be the mature one in control of her conversations with Luke, who doesn’t show so much emotion with his face as with his actions. Could there be ladies like Romina all over the country for this traveling man?

We never find out exactly what happened between Romina and Luke – was it a one-night fling, a week long, a repeat during summers for years, just one day? At first this is frustrating because it could have been a major telling point in how they reacted with each other, or why they didn’t act in certain ways, but then I realized that it doesn’t matter. What matters is everything after he left, which is only coming together because Luke is back for a few hours by fate. The dialogue feels as if it may have been caught candidly on camera and polished up by a colorist. The longer takes let the story unravel as if – for once – we really were there.

Accomplice Robin (Ben Mendelsohn) understands that Luke needs money so he offers a resolution: rob a bank. He’s done it four times twelve years ago and stopped when suspicion started to come his way. He is nonchalant. He is serious. So he teaches the curious Luke how to do it: go for the oldest female bank clerk, then the meekest, don’t take out your gun. “I did four banks with a note,” Robin says.

Luke disregards the advice on his first heist. It’s humorous, but at the same time it’s not for laughing at as we watch the entire process slowly, wincing at how Luke doesn’t know what he’s doing. Yet these people are still scared as he kicks around their desks, shouting hoarsely. I’m surprised that no one really ever reacts during the hold-ups other than to remain calm and obey Luke. Wouldn’t cops start to notice his motorcycle escapes?

After the successful hold-up, he vomits in the back of Robin’s truck. He may be a stuntman by profession, but he isn’t a con artist. They’re about as excited as school boys who scored the hottest dates to the dance. At Robin’s they party to Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” a scene that feels almost awkwardly too long to watch, but that’s because it is. This is all these guys have to celebrate.

Luke is only ever dangerous twice: once lashing out on Romina’s boyfriend, Kofi (Mahershala Ali), in an almost expressionless state, and once in a passively aggressive move on Robin to get his money for a new bike. Violence doesn’t seem to be a part of baby-faced Luke, biker outlaw. When he sets out on the most fateful robbery yet, everything goes wrong before he even goes into the bank – you wince with every slip of his plan. 

This time delays allow the cops to catch up to him as he’s leaving, and a long pursuit ensues through the town, the cemetery, side streets. Luke is getting worse and worse at this game as it goes on, the camera transcending the viewer into a virtual reality, Luke getting trapped and banged up until on foot, running into the closest home. Avery (Bradley Cooper) is eager to take down the bad guy and is clearly on edge with Luke trapped on the top floor.

Here the movie folds into the second third of its triptych setup. By the time we meet Avery I’m surprised to start finding more screen time with the cop and his corrupt co-officers – the film could easily have finished out with Luke and Romina’s story. But Cianfrance keeps Luke in your mind not only because of his history and impact on the rest of the film, but because of what we’ve learned of Luke so far, which is enough to bring us so close we remember him even when he’s gone. Moving into the second part feels almost like a betrayal.

Cianfrance’s story isn’t so much three different stories as it is simply three parts along the timeline of one tale. He brings us into each part deep enough to become invested, and when we move on it’s jarring in an emotional way, missing the characters and stories we had been seeing. We are in the company of wolves with Avery now, and it is only the beginning; he takes an honorable risk to dismantle the corrupt police force and becomes assistant district attorney.

We then resume the story fifteen years later, which seems more like today, which is a beautiful thing Cianfrance has done from the beginning: he doesn’t lay out the opening year for you. Everything seems contemporary but with a strange twist – no smart phones, no hi-tech security in the banks, no fancy Apple computers there either, a disposable camera at the ice cream shop, and clothing that makes you wonder if they’re being hip – but they’re just living in the 90s, with no money, and not concerned over clothing trends. The only concern I have with the jump is the lack of change between Avery and wife Jennifer (Rose Byrne) then, and now. Fifteen years, a divorce and a kid don’t seem to have left any impression.

Avery’s son, AJ, now grown up as a high school senior with slicked hair, exposed chest hair, and a permanent scowl that looks like he could be wearing a mouth guard, moves in with Avery, now a successful man in the DA office, going after politics. We are not surprised to learn, at Avery's father's funeral, that he and Jennifer split up. AJ is careless in regards to school or life. Dad’s got a nice house and that’s all he needs. But he doesn’t have friends in Schenectady – still, it’s hard to feel bad for this kid who clearly just wants to cause moody trouble.

At lunch one day, the familiar cliché of the new kid without a table to sit at, you feel a little pity for AJ. He is a bitter standout among cliques of teens who don’t gel their hair or wear white tank tops. He sits across from a lanky boy, sitting alone, content with eating, looking sly though, a loner but not because he’s a rebel, a loner because he is meek in the company of his peers. He seems a little uncomfortable with AJ – clearly not the type of kid he would take for a friend – but admits he too does drugs, sure, we can leave right now to go smoke. It’s an adventure for them, bonding over whatever they can. As they get high in a tunnel the sound is distorted through marijuana and the façade of thinking they might have just made friends. AJ later has his friend get him ecstasy from a shabby run-down house on a dark town road. Leaving the dealer’s, the cops immediately bust the kids.

Coming to bail out his son, Avery asks about the other boy. His name is Jason Glanton, Luke and Romina’s son. Avery goes into the holding room where AJ tries to apologize, but Avery has him up against the wall, rough, “you can have anything you want but I don’t want you to fucking touch that kid.” AJ has no idea what’s going on, but Avery is terrifying. After AJ questions Jason about Kofi, Jason uncovers suppressed questions regarding his father, getting Kofi to tell him Luke’s name for the first time, which he then takes to Google to find out about Luke the outlaw and Avery the hero who killed him.

After Jason finds out Avery is AJ’s dad, he goes to his dealer’s house that night for a gun, bluntly giving us the foreshadowing for when he shows up in the mirror of AJ’s room the next morning, gun pointed, firing. When Avery comes home, unknowing of any of this, he stops on the stairs, as if suspecting something is wrong with his son – but he then backs down the stairs, Jason pointing the gun at him, giving commands. No word on AJ. Avery drives them into the woods where he and Jason have one of the tensest moments, the camera trailing slowly from the gun down Avery’s back, never knowing when, if it will go off. Jason is not a killer. Neither was his father. But we may have had the least amount of time with this character in this end of the triptych – maybe we don’t know him the way we thought.

The Place Beyond the Pines is not a straightforward narrative about fathers and sons – Cianfrance has made a film worth seeing because it’s more than just a story, it’s a complex layering of affairs, one set in a reality with which we are all familiar. He introduces us to an array of characters who could all be people we know, or ourselves. The cast doesn’t need to convince us of anything – we’re with them all the time, as they morph into dysfunctional families who have found ways of coping and living in routine, and as they deal with the secrets any family has.

Cianfrance’s pacing feels natural in the triptych story, revealing key points embedded in each scene, long and observant on the characters where the emotions are the actions. Sure, there are some thrilling chase scenes, some suspense, but the film isn’t so much about what the characters are doing as much as it is about how the consequences are affecting them; we learn what they do as they do, we put together the pieces as they do, in ways that leave us thinking it over again and again, taking it personally to try to figure out each character.

Cianfrance doesn’t have plot holes in his story, he has room for us to consider these people on levels beyond just script-deep. They aren’t flat at all, they’re fully dimensional like anyone else we know in our lives, neighbors we might see daily or people we share a commute with: we know who they are, what they do, we might know a little about their family or what they like, we might know a secret or two, but we don’t know everything about them. We can try to sympathize, and some of us might empathize, and for that we are brought a little closer to these characters. They move us, more than any other film ensemble of the year.

Shelby Shaw is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and artist living in Chicago. You can find her website here. She twitters here and tumbls here.

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In Which We Go On After It Happens

What She Doesn't Know

by SHELBY SHAW

Red Widow
creator Melissa Rosenberg

ABC’s new series, Red Widow, is the American redo of a Dutch show called Penoza. Aside from this version being shot in well-to-do Northern California and the need to constantly introduce tropes of American family values, the plot remains between the two versions of the show: Marta Walraven (Radha Mitchell) must take over the business of her husband (Anson Mount) after he is murdered.

By “business” it isn’t his work at the marina per se, but the Russian mafia drug-trading he was roped into by marrying Marta in the first place, she a sort-of mafia whose suspicious brother Irwin (Wil Traval) had convinced Evan to join. 

For one thing, Marta seems strangely clueless about anything involving her own family’s trade. Her father is some big mobster who hangs in a dark place called Café Russiya, but apparently he cannot really protect her and her family when she wants to be disconnected.

We never really learn the extent of her father’s power in the mob, or why he isn’t more powerful. If anything, Marta seems like more of an outsider. She doesn’t entirely know what Evan and Irwin are ever doing for business, and she has no idea about the details involving their protection and relations with the cops. She seems to think that if Evan fails to pull them out of the business and she left with their three children, that she would be safe even without a husband. He gently reminds her often that she doesn’t understand, which is painfully evident.

It isn’t clear what Marta does while Evan is at the marina doing business and the kids are at school. At one point, a police officer states that she’s a housewife and I realize that without this statement I may not have known – Marta is always somewhere or at an event, like her sister Kat’s (Jaime Ray Newman) wedding.

But that’s just it – everything moves so quickly, it’s hard to get a grounding on who these people really are. Sure, we get just enough facts to put together a family portrait, and of course we are left in the dark about most things because a series needs to reveal information weekly, but in terms of the characters as real people… there just seems to be something amiss with each of them, something that doesn’t make them fully human or three-dimensional.

Take their youngest child, Boris (Jakob Salvati), who acts as the catalyst for Marta wanting out of the business in the first place. He brings Evan’s gun to school one day in an attempt to defy his bully, and to be honest, the foreshortened camera angle on the cocked and loaded gun is kind of terrifying because I am not ready to see this kind of gore. But after the scene promptly ends with a cut to the principal’s office, followed by Marta warning Evan that she’ll leave him, the entire thing is forgotten and never mentioned again. Nobody seems fazed that Boris almost killed another child, in public at school, or that he even got a hold of Evan’s gun. Nobody seems to be concerned about what Boris is going through, about the bully, or about whether he learned his lesson.

After Evan dies close to the end of the pilot (for a show called Red Widow I wouldn’t consider this to be a spoiler alert), the necessary montage of crying family members at the hospital is a nice slowness that gets you to feel something after nearly 30 minutes of exposition. But again, the next day hardly feels like the father of these children, the husband of this woman, the friend to his coworkers, has not only died (in front of Boris) but was murdered. Wouldn’t you take a break from your life, mafia or not? It’s only when Marta comes home to find the police ransacking their house that she reminds them (and us) that her husband is barely cold, as she puts it. As much as the dialogue is exposition for our sake as third-party viewers, I feel as if the entire episode is composed purely of self-conscious wording, not genuine lines to tell each other but to tell the viewers.

I don’t want to find out what happens to these people. I’m guided by tropes left and right and can’t begin to imagine how any plot-twist might surface (and would it really surprise us?), not to mention the music tells you everything before it even happens. From this sampling of the series, I’ve learned that nobody really knows anything, the family is dysfunctional because they don’t really interact much on screen, and anything that could be considered devastating might very well not even change the characters’ interiors.

Shelby Shaw is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and artist living in Chicago. You can find her website here. She twitters here and tumbls here.

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In Which Money Buys Judd Apatow Happiness

With Luxury

by SHELBY SHAW

This Is 40
dir. Judd Apatow
133 minutes

If anything, Judd Apatow should have titled his new effort This Is My Life In 2012, and not only because Apatow’s wife of 15 years is cast as the lead mom/wife, Debbie (Leslie Mann), alongside the couple’s two daughters as 13-year-old Sadie (Maude Apatow) and 8-year-old Charlotte (Iris Apatow). Alternatives such as This Is Marriage or This Is Family or even This Is Life would not have been any better.

The family in This Is 40, rounded out by the deceiving and charming Pete (Paul Rudd), is anything but typical. Sure, the daughters go through tantrums against the parents and bouts of getting along/hating one another, and there are plenty of problems stemming from woes of finances and in-laws, but this is not the average American family. For one thing, their California house is gorgeous and massive, and at one point even called out as too big for the four of them by Pete’s overbearingly dependent father, Larry (Albert Brooks), who Pete secretly continues to lend money to despite having told Debbie he hasn’t done so in years.

Despite the family’s lavish home, decorated and conveniently organized like a Pottery Barn catalogue, and the private catering for Pete’s 40th birthday party (only days after Debbie’s own birthday, which is celebrated as turning 38), and the nice cars they each have, and Debbie’s personal trainer Jason (Jason Segel), and Sadie’s random anger outburst in her walk-in closet over needing new clothes – despite all this, the family is having financial problems.

Debbie’s clothing boutique, Lulu’s, is your dime-a-dozen L.A. clothing store, something you would find in the likes of New Canaan or Katonah, and seems to be relatively new at her career. Whatever she did beforehand for a job is a mystery. Pete is a music producer, and manages the British rocker Graham Parker, whose latest album is hardly selling past 600 copies.

So how does this family of four manage to have weekend get-aways and still afford their life in-house? While, let’s not forget, secretly supplying $80,000 to Larry, in order to support him, his wife and their test-tube triplets who are always dressed in the exact same outfit? Something seems a little suspicious about their money 'woes', until at one point (late in the film) Debbie mentions how Pete’s left Sony to work on his own. So he made a lot of money in the past, I guess, and it’s lasted them through now.

Oh, and provided all of their little goodies along the way. The cars, Pete’s bicycle and matching Livestrong gear, Debbie’s trainer, and the girls’ countless personal items (including photos with Justin Bieber and the Jonas brothers, both of which are events that probably happened in the Apatows’ lives but here are simply shameless props), constitute the mere basics – This Is 40 is essentially a commercial for Apple.

It would be impossible to think Apple was not a sponsor, considering how iPhone, iPad, iTunes, iHome, etc are all used not only physically, but named constantly by the characters. Yes, many/most people own an Apple product. But the way we just end up expecting the girls to watch Lost on an iPad, or for Pete to be found playing Scrabble on his iPad while on the toilet, or for Debbie to pull out her iPhone, or jump onto her MacBook in order to see if hot-to-trot salesgirl Desi (Megan Fox) is stealing $12,000 from Lulu’s, all feels like too much of a privilege.

Is this really what being 40 is about? Having all the latest technology in a big house with a swimming pool and caterers and doctors' appointments where they all seem to promise you good fortune and good looks and good health just for showing up? I may not be 40, I may not be married, I may not have kids, but I know that this isn’t what your average household is up to. Maybe in Los Angeles or Orange County, or even Fairfield or Westchester counties on the opposite coast, but I live there and that is not even what most of those families are like.

The film is about having privilege and luxury, alongside “common” domestic problems. But it probably does not speak to the majority of families, married couples, or even 40-year-olds in the country. Debbie’s constant fear of Pete losing interest in her would insult me as a viewer if I were 40 – I am sure the majority of women that age would kill to have Debbie’s looks; in fact, I would not mind looking like that right now and I am half her age. Together, the couple effortlessly steals the attention when they are out, like something out of a bank commercial, as pointed out by an angry and outlandishly brutish parent from school, Catherine (Melissa McCarthy).

I am not even sure that kids who would see the film, for whatever reason, would be able to relate to Sadie and Charlotte. Puberty can make any adolescent seethe with unwarranted rage. Sadie comes off as simply unstable with anger when she throws tantrums over needing new clothing in her walk-in closet or hating her family for not letting her carry out a bizarre obsession with watching as much Lost in as little time as she can. Meanwhile Charlotte seems the quiet prodigy of  a piano playing and humble family caretaker, but is more of just a Shirley Temple-esque face for the screen, making “cute” kid quips about this or that, often with the kind of stilted candor only a child who hasn’t had much time to practice the lines could deliver. Regardless, my biggest question is whether all kids these days own iPads and have iPhones that their parents take away when they are grounded.

The perfect lives of the family, chipped here and there by stress from work or each other, are hardly entertaining when the ending comes together in an almost too-resolved fashion. And aside from Rudd and Mann’s good looks, their conversations feed off one another like something from improv comedy; it’s like they constantly are mocking the other’s lines, and it gets annoying quickly.

The couple seems the most genuine when either high on marijuana cookies, practicing the kind of talk their therapist suggested, or simply crying. This Is 40 tries too hard to portray what it's trying to sell itself as: the poster-child for mid-life crises, family dysfunction and love, and coming to terms with yourself in your age. It should have been called This Is What You Wish 40 Could Be, because there does not seem to really be anything wrong.

Shelby Shaw is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and artist living in Chicago. You can find her website here. She twitters here.

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