Open Doom Crescendo director Terry Chiu explores the loss and abandonment overshadowed by the A-lister cops-and-robbers drama that The Place Beyond The Pines advertised

My initial piece on The Place Beyond the Pines was supposed to be a borderline-academic dissertation on the film’s marketing-campaign-defying reveal of Dane DeHaan becoming the main character, with Ryan Gosling and company as red herrings. Then I got my heart shattered.

I acknowledge the irony of processing a breakup through the cops-and-robbers-based story of The Place Beyond the Pines and not Derek Cianfrance’s previous film, the romantic drama Blue Valentine (2010). I’m still going to get to Dane DeHaan, but please oblige my stream of consciousness re-examination of how this film pluralizes heartbreak.

Author’s note: Total spoilers for this modern-day sprawling masterpiece.

The Place Beyond the Pines is ostensibly about Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), a vagabond stunt motorcyclist carnie, who reconnects with an old flame, Romina (Eva Mendes), while his act is in town. Unbeknownst to him, she’s now raising their son with her new well-adjusted man, Kofi (Mahershala Ali). Luke begins trying to insert himself into Romina’s life to support their child via hardcore crime, which leads him on a collision course with careerist rookie cop Avery (Bradley Cooper). When their chase ends with Luke cornered, a lone and panicked Avery fatally shoots Luke before the latter can surrender. In the aftermath, Avery conceals his wrongdoing and becomes preoccupied with advancing himself and fixing a corrupt police force that he is hypocritically complicit in.

This story is however really about these characters’ actions destroying not only each other’s lives but the lives of their next generation — notably Luke’s son, Jason Glanton (Dane DeHaan). Luke and Avery’s respective deflections create the consequences their children must eventually burden. That consequence is loss. Luke’s son grows up into a brooding placeless loner; Avery’s son, AJ (Emory Cohen), grows up to be an obnoxious wannabe-gangster douchebag.

I write through my heartache as an exercise in self-accountability with the hope that it won’t be used against me. I do plenty of deflecting, but I give myself a hard time in life and take as much responsibility as I can. Clearly it wasn’t enough, otherwise I wouldn’t be using a film starring exclusively sexy Hollywood actors playing small-town American characters to relate to. Yet self-accountability and responsibility are traits the adult characters of The Place Beyond the Pines lack. Upon learning of his son with Romina, Luke claims biological father dibs over Kofi instead of realizing he long ago should’ve stayed in touch with Romina. He justifies robbing banks with his new ability to be a winning provider. Avery deflects being a cold and absent dad and ex-husband to AJ and Jennifer (Rose Byrne) respectively by being too busy reforming the Schenectady police department in his own image. It becomes a distraction from the fact that he’s a corrupt cop for not owning up to killing Luke unjustly. The shame that Avery feels for not taking responsibility for shooting down Luke is what prevents Avery from looking at his infant son, let alone being a present father later in AJ’s life.

The film is marketed and almost exclusively talked about as a Ryan Gosling thirst trap drama extravaganza, with Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, and Ray Liotta in it, too. Dane DeHaan is visible in a single blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot in the trailer, along with one extra appearance near the end as a silhouette. But these two shots (the first especially, which is a closeup between him and Emory Cohen beefing) are so crucially timed that, in retrospect, you can’t help but see the trailer as intentionally misleading, and advertising a Luke Glanton/Ryan Gosling “heartthrob” (the word literally tattooed across his neck) story, and not what turns out to ultimately be a story about Luke’s son, Jason.

What’s interesting and even frustrating is how so long after its release, the film is still almost exclusively remembered for its first 45 minutes. Gosling is tremendous as Luke. I have nothing to say against his performance. And though the film never received a great deal of attention — mainstream or indie-wise — in the first place, I take issue with how culture selectively fixates on one element but glaringly leaves out an equally consequential if-not-more-compelling element. It’s one thing if you justifiably find the third act weaker; it’s another where I think a lot of casuals and even cinephiles dismiss the film because they felt cheated out of a full Ryan Gosling vehicle.

If Luke represents loss — not only of the protagonist that audiences went into the film for, but the character who most affects the rest of the characters — then Jason represents not only the ultimate protagonist we are unexpectedly led to, but the character that most carries the aftermath of loss. Additionally, Avery’s shame represents loss — his avoiding AJ results in the latter developing into said obnoxious wannabe-gangster douchebag.

And in both of these cases, it’s the loss of love.

It’s the loss of lived catharsis, plans you had, hopes and realized-and-not-yet-realized dreams you were discovering, promises, and of the person who would have you convinced they were here to stay. You didn’t plan for that loss, but the loss has found its way to shatter your heart and dunk the dust shards out the car window on their way to the airpo—

You didn’t plan for that loss, but loss happens. Life can seem to restart from the point of that loss, and as of that given moment, it is through the ashes and rubble of broken promises that we must try to make sense of things. Those are the pines that Jason navigates, and the story is that of finding the place beyond it all.

My dead dad was in ways considered by society as a lowlife deadbeat. He hit jackpots by having people throughout his life pick him up (literally me when he was drunk) and pick up after him, and because he found my mom, he got to thrive even as a low-class citizen. As much as I resented him, he must’ve, in a poetically ironic way, passed how I felt about him onto me as a dying, spiteful mic drop. I feel perceived as a lowlife deadbeat because society is utterly disdainful towards artists; otherwise the fruits of my labor would portray me as at least well-adjusted — just like society would view Luke’s bike stunts as daringly legitimate employment and not him being a lowlife deadbeat carnie. Even more poetically ironic is that my lowlife deadbeat dad always thought, and died thinking, that I was the lowlife deadbeat for being an artist.

But that wider perception of lowlife deadbeat status by society’s gaze didn’t truly hit me until it hit closest to the heart and defenestrated it — with it the hopes, dreams, and promises of what made the raw experience of life worth living beyond the transcendental acts of art that don’t make my physiological life worthwhile. And because Luke was damned by his life choices and the judgment of those around him, and because his whole life went to Hell,¹ Jason, and I, the viewer, must reckon with the post-traumatic aftermath Hell that is a life that has deemed us unworthy of love.

It’s a cliché but as my friend Pete says, clichés exist for a reason.² Just right now, it’s a negative cliché that I feel myself becoming my father in certain ways, or I feel the scars left by him of which I can at once blame him for and not. That’s gotta be another reason I feel a connection to Jason in Beyond the Pines.

Luke was out of his depth when it came to trying to be the man in Romina’s life. She has her hands full with work, raising baby Jason, and being supported by Kofi. Luke comes into this situation financially and emotionally unqualified, and it is not his place to impose himself as the righteous provider by robbing banks, trying to steal Romina back. He even violently assaults Kofi in Kofi’s own house when he arrives unannounced with a gift crib to win over Romina and spite Kofi. Just because you’re poor but still want to be your woman’s man doesn’t entitle you to it, and it certainly doesn’t give you permission to go rob banks and assault anyone in your way.

And while I didn’t rob banks and beat up my ex’s new partners, I recognize how exhausting, intense, and overly-baggaged I am; I understand the reasons, for my part, that my relationship fell apart.

How much a kid turns out like their dad isn’t necessarily the dad’s fault by design. But Luke didn’t have to show baby Jason that he robs banks so that Jason could end up stealing drugs from a pharmacy. Luke didn’t have to show Jason how to feel like an outcast for Jason to wander a loner through high school hallway crowds. Luke states, “I wasn’t around my dad and look at the fuckin’ way I turned out” — he then fittingly gets killed, like, the same month, ensuring he won’t be around Jason, and we all see how Jason turns out.

Except Jason doesn’t turn out just like his dad. In the closing scene, Jason goes to a lone stranger in the quiet countryside to buy a secondhand motorbike. The stranger, Mr. Anthony, asks Jason if he’s ever ridden one; Jason doesn’t answer and rides off as if he’s always known how. He rides, carrying with him nothing but the legend of his father, with only old news articles and oral stories from Luke’s once-friend Robin (Ben Mendelsohn) to interpret through. Whether Jason’s life as an outlaw unfolds in harmony or tragedy is unknown. In one moment Jason holds Avery at gunpoint in the pine forest, evoking the gun Luke once pointed at so many. The next moment Jason spares Avery upon hearing him through guilt-ridden sobs say, “I’m sorry, Jason… I’m sorry.”

The sins of our fathers may haunt us, but they do not have to define us. Luke’s outcast lifestyle and Avery’s corruption both bring down and drag others’ lives out with them, and the lasting impacts and scars stay with characters long into Jason’s story. It’s largely because Luke and Avery couldn’t live with the rejection of not being good enough. But Jason leaves, knowing self-discovery exists beyond rejection, and that there is beauty to riding alone into the unknown.

I’ve little doubt that The Place Beyond the Pines’ promotion focusing almost exclusively on all the hot big name stars was a strategy to get butts in the seats — even if it didn’t work very well. But I also believe that deliberately advertising the film as a cops-and-robbers drama, when it quickly unravels into something so much more, willfully embraces the backlash it would incur for not being what many people thought they wanted. But it is not done with cynicism or irony; the advertisement’s absence of Jason only makes the film’s reveal all the more profound as a story about buried trauma and long-lost catharsis. Many leave the film wishing Luke just remained the protagonist; I feel like no one but me sees and wants Jason’s story. Jason is damned by Luke to be a bastard child, one his community and even family keep in the dark and neglect, as if a stain. Meanwhile, Jason is damned by audiences as a bastard protagonist — a disappointing bait-and-switch lead they did not ask for. Despite the backlash the creatives of The Place Beyond the Pines would’ve surely expected, it is one that holds a mirror to how audiences perceive Jason, parallel to how he’s perceived in the film.

The most compelling of stories and characters are often cast as shadows. Whereas he appears as a shadow in his own trailer, Jason exists throughout his closing act of Beyond the Pines in the shadow of Luke — Jason being an outsider even amongst outsiders. Yet it’s with the outsider amongst outsiders where storytelling’s catharsis can be most soulfully expressed, where those who feel least seen find intangible shelter.

I understand the more-accessible sex appeal of rock star wanderers like Luke Glanton and his abs, but as a person and as an artist, it’s the somber brooding melancholy of Jason Glanton that I can relate my angst most to. I’m no one’s main character in their life, not even my ex’s, despite what she otherwise declared, which I fricking knew would turn out to be empty words. *Stoic* And I still feel like the only artist amongst even my “alternative/outsider”-crowned peers to be excluded despite the work I defiantly know I’ve put in. But I have to keep learning that I, as a person and artist, am not the one people think they want. Jason Glanton was no one’s main character in his life; but he is the protagonist in my perspective of The Place Beyond the Pines.

How does that inspire my own self-discovery beyond rejection?

One way to start is to reaffirm that the life of a deep brooding artist is not (necessarily) one of a deadbeat. Go ahead and try telling all the not-that-many-but-still-significant people whose lives were bettered by my work that what I do isn’t an essential service — that outsider art doesn’t make life worthwhile. I’m learning my worth. I wish I could ride off into the rural sunset. But I’ll have to find my own place beyond the pines. Maybe I’ve already started.

1.  The heavens would in all likeliness be too judgy and send him to literal Hell too. ↩︎
2.  He was using it in a more positive way, so I’ll try to honor him and spin it back full circle. ↩︎

Read Jim Hickcox’s 2024 interview with Terry Chiu here
Buy Open Doom Crescendo and Mangoshake from Gold Ninja Video

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