The movie that brought together Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes: a nostalgic look at the 'great American cinema'

Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes are one of Hollywood's most stable couples. They're also one of the most private couples, to the point that seeing them together in the stands of the Paris Olympics has made headlines.

The last time the couple posed together on a red carpet was during the premiere of The Place Beyond The Pines, the movie where they met and began their relationship, but back then they posed only as co-stars because they hadn't made their relationship official yet.

In this crime drama by Derek Cianfrance, Gosling plays Luke, an acrobatic motorcycle rider traveling with a circus, a rebellious, mysterious, and womanizing man who one day finds out he's become a father with his former lover, Romina (Mendes).

Even though it wasn't part of his plans, he immediately decides to change his life and accept the responsibility of fatherhood. The problem is that raising a child requires economic resources he doesn't have at the moment, so he decides to start robbing banks with another individual to easily and quickly make some money, using his motorcycle skills to achieve it.

His criminal career gets hindered by a policeman following his trail, Avery Cross, (Bradley Cooper), a young, ambitious rookie working in a department led by a corrupt detective.

Bradley Cooper and Rose Byrne

Along with Gosling, Mendes, and Cooper in the cast, other standout actors include Ben Mendelsohn, Rose Byrne, Mahershala Ali, Bruce Greenwood, Harris Yulin, and Ray Liotta.

Director's Inspiration

Cianfrance says he was inspired inspired by his experiences as a father, and Ben Coccio and Darius Marder, who shared similar interests in paternofilial relationships, masculine identity, and legacy as in the father's sins passed down to the sons, helped him write the screenplay.

The formal inspiration came when he watched the silent movie Napoleon, by Abel Gance, from 1927, which uses the triptych technique to portray multiple stories at once. In 2007, the birth of Cianfrance's second child revived the idea, and he began to think again about being a father, about the responsibilities it entails, about how the decisions we make echo through the generations.

'The Place Beyond The Pines'

This movie reunited Cianfrance and Gosling, who had previously worked together on Blue Valentine, so the director wrote the character of Luke specifically with the actor in mind, who had once expressed his fantasy of playing a bank robber on a motorcycle.

Critical Reception

The Place Beyond The Pines was included in the list of the 10 best films of 2012 by all specialized media. On Rotten Tomatoes, 78% of the 228 critic reviews are positive, with an average score of 7.2 out of 10.

IndieWire's Kevin Jagernauth praised the film as an "ambitious epic that shares thematic elements with Cianfrance's previous movie but expands its scope into a magnificent widescreen story about fathers, sons, and the legacy of sins passed down through generations."

The Daily Telegraph's critic, Robbie Collin, drew parallels between Gosling's character and James Dean's Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and stated that Cianfrance's movie was "of the kind of great American cinema that we mourn having lost."

Claudia Puig from USA Today said the film is a "shrewd examination of masculinity" and praised "its visual style and its attractive look at a multigenerational saga."

*This article has been automatically translated using artificial intelligence