THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES

(Derek Cianfrance, 2012)

Long, slow, sombre and oh-so serious, Cianfrance's film is the sort of old-fashioned grand American filmmaking many assume no longer exists. It is also immensely flawed, though the strength of its directors bold style and commanding technique obscures this to a large extent.
A mightily ambitious family saga with touches of melodrama and crime in its DNA, it begins with Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), a stunt motorbike rider at a travelling carnival who is approached upon his return to an upstate New York town by a local girl with whom he once had a fling. Romena (Eva Mendes) had his baby, and once she lets him know, his wandering days end, and he sticks around, falling in with Ben Mendelsohn's scuzzy mechanic and causing trouble for just about everyone. That trouble eventually crosses the line into outright criminality, and the consequences of his actions effect local cop Avery (Bradley Cooper), who is struggling with the corruption around him and his own issues with his father and wife (Rose Byrne). The connection between these two men is echoed years later when their sons meet by chance.
The kind of ambition Cianfrance shows here is a gamble. While it may be impressive in its own right - not many young directors have such reach or even understand how to conjure up the sort of intensity The Place Beyond The Pines frequently manages - it demands an exceptional level of talent to deliver an end product worthy of it's loftier goals.
Cianfrance is undoubtedly a talent. He has a fine eye and infuses scenes with an arty sense of personality, a coherent and distinctly individual view of the world which gives his film a haunted, emotional quality which makes it seem more interesting than it actually is. The problem then is that his central thesis here - the evil that men do, basically - is such a watery one that it renders his film little more than a torrid, extremely male melodrama. It plays not unlike the work of James Gray, only lacking his sense of intelligence and some of the complexity his work evinces.
It has a strong ensemble, but a couple of the actors are lazily cast. Gosling, for instance, plays Gosling, more avatar than character, all wardrobe choices (inside-out t-shirts), constant cigarette and pout. He poses better than any other actor currently alive, and does a sort of method angst, but he is superficial here, at best. Then there is Ray Liotta, here playing a corrupt, strangely menacing Cop, whose nature we understand almost as soon as we see his face.
Faring best is Bradley Cooper in a tricky role. His cocksure smirk is wiped away by the plot here, and the sweaty anxiety which replaces it makes of him a far more compelling figure.
What we are left with, then, is a good tale, quite well told. If only it hadn't presented itself as so much more.

KILLING THEM SOFTLY

(Andrew Dominik, 2012) If the last couple of decades have brought about a proliferation of dramas and black comedies all set within the lower to middle management ranks of the mob - everything from Goodfellas and The Sopranos to Analyze This - then George V Higgins can be considered very much ahead of his time. He was writing novels like this from 1970 onwards, and Peter Yates' terrific adaptation of The Friends of Eddie Coyle captures the world of those books with grit and precision both. Andrew Dominik's film adapts Higgins' book Cogans Trade, and aside from needlessly changing the title, alters little. The structure, characters and plot are generally identical, and much of the - quite brilliant - dialogue comes from Higgins verbatim. What is different is the setting. Higgins book was set in the grim mid-70s, but Dominick sets his film in 2008, the election year in which Barack Obama and John McCain battled to become US President while the American Economy virtually collapsed. He underlines this - a touch heavy-handedly - with recurrent cutaways to politicians discussing the economy on tv, and portions of scenes are soundtracked to similar speeches. This works mainly because Higgins was so interested in the workings of crime as a business. Here, Richard Jenkins is a harassed corporate stooge and middleman, needing committee approval to release funds, insisting that out of town hit men travel in economy. Everybody is on the make, everybody is out for himself, everybody is desperate to make money, and in a final scene (not quite in the book), Brad Pitt's Jackie Cogan, a fixer-cum-assassin, makes that clear. This films last line is "Pay me my money". The story is told in tangents and filled with extended riffs and monologues by newly introduced characters, but the central plot focuses on two inept, ragged young ex-cons (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn, both outstanding) who hold up a mob card game, and the fallout from this act. The mobster who runs the game, Markie (Ray Liotta) has to pay for past indiscretions, the two young cons have to pay, and their backer has to pay. So Cogan is brought in and he in turn brings in New York Jimmy (James Gandolfini, essaying another fine portrait of decaying masculinity) and Kenny (Slaine), while throughout cons and hitmen swap anecdotes about jail time sodomy, dogshit, prostitutes, and preferred murder methodology. Eventually, however, the violence must begin. And you just know that in the universe created by Higgins and Dominik, that violence will be coruscating. All of this might sound quite Tarantino-esque, and indeed it might be if not for the fact that Higgins influenced Tarantino but retains an essential, unique quality to his storytelling ably imitated here, and for Dominik's distinctively muscular sense of cinema. Here is a Director with a Capital D, composing scenes with dazzling assurance, from the opening sound-clash walk through rubbish in the wind to the heroin high scored (familiarly but satisfyingly) by the Velvet Underground to the bravura scenes of shocking violence. This world also sets itself apart from those of Tarantino's work by its grit; Dominik textures it so that it feels like the world we live in, rain-slicked and shabby as it is, its junkies looking like they stink, its cars and clothes and beer bottles all quotidian and weighted. Pitt has rarely been better (though he chews on his lips as usual), age giving him a bearing and depth his youthful beauty never allowed, and his scenes with a mordant, droll Jenkins are a delight. All this in a film with no real hero, no fixed character to root for; which may be Dominik's point; in a world as torn by economic trauma as todays, there is no space for honour, loyalty, no room for anybody to be a good guy. Instead there is only the struggle for money, the battle for survival, which gives the violence in Killing Them Sofly so much sting. Cogan says it in his slightly didactic last speech: "In America, you're on your own." Dominik is a major filmmaker, and his ambition is to be applauded, even if it only partially comes off in this instance. Still, Killing Them Softly is big, bold, beautiful American filmmaking with wit and flash, that would not have looked out of place in the 1970s, and that is very high praise indeed.

CROSSING OVER

(Wayne Kramer, 2009)

Based on his early work, Kramer seemed a promising young genre director. Those films - The Cooler and Running Scared - while never particularly original or interesting, were full of pulp energy, good work from actors and solid storytelling. It may be telling that the only truly compelling scene in Crossing Over, his ambitious attempt to make a panoramic, multi-strand real world epic, is the closest to genre material the entire film ever comes. An immigration cop finds himself in a gas station convenience store as it is held up by a bunch of Korean gang-bangers, and once he draws his gun, Kramer pulls out a terrifically gripping scene of thrilling action which is brilliantly put together.
Aside from that, too much here feels like dull tv movie material.
That's a shame, because this is a laudably serious, worthy subject; the varying experiences of illegal immigrants and the government workers who deal with them in modern California. Kramer runs about six separate strands in parallel, allowing them to intersect as the film progresses, contrasting the struggles of a Muslim Pakistani family who stray into the crosshairs of the FBI, with the story of a young Australian Actress sleeping with an Immigration clerk to get a green card, with a young Mexican mother deported and trying to cross back into America and more. Then there are the agents; Harrison Ford's conscience-stricken immigration cop, Ashley Judd's clucky attorney and Cliff Curtis as Ford's partner, battling with his wild younger sister.
It's ambition is part of the problem; none of the stories really gets enough time or weight, meaning that when it reaches the big emotional climax stage, little of it really stings the way it should. That may be partly down to the fact that it was butchered in editing - Sean Penn famously had an entire storyline cut out, meaning he's no longer even in the film - and it was controversially altered to avoid explicit reference to "honour killings" in one narrative strand, but it doesn't explain everything. It's also distractingly contrived, many of the narrative links annoyingly tenuous, filled with easy stereotypes instead of fully-formed characters (the kindly rabbi, the racist classmates, the cocky lawyer etc) and it lacks the vitality and style of Kramer's early work; it looks and sounds a little boring.
There are good things; a few of the scenes have the cheap, undeniable potency of a good pop song in their emotional peaks and troughs, and some of the performances - mainly from the lesser-known cast-members - are terrific, even in the little time devoted to some of these characters.
But generally, this is a missed opportunity, and one that seems to have damaged Kramer's career; he hasn't directed a film since.