Judge Al Cross: It's the life of a cop. A life my son chose.
With Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes, Anthony Pizza
Another film Tumor (who incidentally also reviewed this film, which you can find here) introduced me to. Earlier I had read the synopsis on IMDb and liked the premise, was intrigued by the lengths someone would go to to protect someone they loved.
The first thing you would notice about the film is its atmosphere. The muted colors, the lush greenery and what I can assume are pine trees, and the haunting music that foreshadows the problems ahead for Luke Glayton, an expert motorcyclist who works as a stuntman for a traveling show. In one of the stops, he meets Romina, a beautiful woman who appears at the beginning of the film as a troubled but independent character. Little does Luke know he has fathered a son with her, something he will come to discover a year later. By this time Romina has begun living with another man, Kofi, who is not too enthused about letting Luke into his son's life. Luke feels he has nothing to offer his son, and is sucked into a series of bank robberies to help provide for his son--attentions which go unwelcome but for which he eventually sacrifices his life.
A highly symbolic tale, some may criticize it to be burdened by silences and symbols and the screen time to have gone on for too long. Usually I am the first to be bored by arty silences and long pans of the face and so on, but for this film it somehow worked. At its core it is a film about family, about inheritance, lineage, genealogical destiny, generational sin and fate. It's a highly deterministic tale, reminiscent of Emile Zola's novel Germinal. The sins of the fathers are passed down to the son and so on. It's also I think a film about integrity and honor--about paying one's dues and karmic repercussions.
There are six pairs of father-son relationships in this highly patriarchal film, and each son mimics either consciously or unconsciously the patterns of their father. To start with Luke and his absent father (for which Luke tries to compensate by being present for his son, Jason and ultimately fails), Luke and Robin (the man who teaches him how to rob banks and acts as a surrogate father figure), Judge Al Cross and his son, Avery Cross (who was the police officer who shot Luke to his death and is encouraged by his father to play up to this incident and use it to his advantage) and Avery Cross and his son AJ (who Jason befriends later on in the film and who uses Jason in ways similar to how his father Avery used Luke's death for his career), Luke and his son Jason (who ends up buying a motorcycle and traveling the west in the same way Luke did) and Jason and his relationship with Kofi. Mothers play little to no role in this film -- and women are curiously absent/silenced. In a telling scene, when Jason discovers he is in the house of the man who was responsible for his father's death, he is currently making out with a girl. He shoves her away to go start a fight with AJ.
Ultimately for me, this film worked because it portrays a piece of reality not everyone owns up to right away. The immense influence our parents can have on us, whether conscious or unconscious, and whether it's mimicking them or rebelling from them. Yet there is a moment of freedom, when one realizes the influence, and realizes whether to be sucked into the circle or not. In this film, each son had a moment of epiphany when they could choose whether to follow in their father's footsteps or not.
I liked: The quiet symbolism. The music, the acting.
I disliked: I would have liked more focus on the mothers, and on the women. I feel it would have added to the breadth and complexity of the film.
76/100
An engaging film narrating the coming-of-age of several characters. A movie of those little, but defining moments in our lives. Also a film about love.
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