Pain and Gain

Michael Bay, who has made a career out of Dumbing Down action films, turns around and makes a black comedy satirizing Dumbed Down America. Not since Clint’s Unforgiven have we seen such a profound conversion. The film’s last words summarize the point: “Bad scene: the American Dream.” So, too, the opening shot, where Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) works out on a perch sticking out of a huge billboard (when he should be hiding from the cops). 

The film is based on the true story of three Florida bodybuilders who kidnapped a wealthy mogul and extorted all he had. But its real subject is the danger and stupidity of those who fall for the myth of the country’s exceptionalism and entitlement. As the victim Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub) tells gang leader Lugo, he’s doomed to fail because he hasn’t taken the trouble to get educated.Instead he has cultivated the vain myth of the body beautiful and the power of positive thinking. He’s been seduced by a huckster who sells the religion of being a Doer, not a Don’t-er, regardless of what is being done. It’s Self-Help Yourself run amok. They destroy themselves by buying the myth that anyone can get rich in this political system; that’s how Margaret Thatcher and recent Republican presidents drew the votes even of people their policies betrayed. Like our heroes, the gulls imagine themselves joining the wealthy -- so they destroy themselves to find a shortcut there. 

Each of the three “heroes” has a weakness at the heart of his ostensible strength. Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) hides his penal inadequacy by inflating his physique. Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) is a reborn Christian who lapses back into coke. Like director Bay, Wahlberg and Johnson brilliantly play against their familiar personae as sharp, intuitive  action heroes. In contrast, Ed Harris comes on as the retired private eye who -- as Ed Harris characters usually do -- lives out a proper ethical code and restores justice. In this Swiftian landscape he and his wife are the film’s only solid characters. They're the only ones satisfied with what they have honestly gathered. 

What makes this film more biting than a simple comedy of three laughably stupid gangsters --and the comically inadequate cops who should be catching them -- is the proliferation of American flags and eagles and calls to US patriotism. This is not about three musclebound stooges but about the culture that believes the bromides of US optimism.  As America’s classic gangster genre established, crime is just another form of capitalism, perhaps the most essential one. It posits the every man for himself ethic and the moral responsibility to get rich any way one can. These three dopes stand in for the much brighter brokers and bankers who destroyed the economy and escaped not just unscathed but bonused.

As each major character narrates a portion of the story, the thugs reveal an astonishing self-unawareness and unearned confidence. The claim to look powerful and  confident is undercut by their Scooby Doo seat covers. The plethora of available sexpots and the men’s own rippling muscles satirize the nation’s macho and futile pretense. A gunshop scene with another militant Christian neatly encapsulates the NRA’s union with the Tea Party.

As a black comedy the film combines non-stop sharp laughs with several scenes of gore. If the comedy dramatizes the heroes‘ incompetence, vanity and unfounded confidence, the gore reminds us of the danger of such belligerent ambition. Especially when the subject is not just a few dumb gunsels but a nation with an army.  

The Place Beyond the Pines

Derek Cianfrance’s epic strikes an old-fashioned romantic note about how one’s character is shaped by DNA and destiny. 

The three-part structure is classic form. The Thesis is the wild, egotistic life of the daredevil motorcyclist, Luke (Ryan Gosling). The Antithesis is the supposedly hero cop, Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), a law graduate who prefers the adrenaline of police work and eventually reformist politics. In his good citizenry he turns against the benefits of corruption in the force. This stand makes him another loner, but in contrast to Luke’s rootlessness. 

Luke and Avery are more alike than their surface differences suggest. Blonde Luke is laced with tattoos, while the lawyer cop is dark and clean. Luke didn’t know his father; Avery’s is a retired judge who can advise him when he needs. When Avery kills Luke both have matching wives and one-year-old sons. But from then on their likeness trumps their difference. The survivor Avery can’t shake the memory of the life he Crossed. His conscience keeps Luke’s family photo in Avery’s wallet and leads him to spring Luke’s son Jason (Dane DeHaan) from jail. Ultimately, though, the winners (the Crosses) win and the losers (Luke, Jason) lose. And so it goes, from generation to generation, though Cianfrance valorizes Jason’s flight. 

In the Synthesis the two men’s sons clash. Cianfrance clearly prefers the jerk Luke over the responsible citizen Avery, so Jason kicks over the traces of the stable, loving life his mother and his adoptive father gave him and chooses to live out his father’s dashing folly. He buys a bike and -- apparently having inherited the motorcycle gene -- heads out for The Place Beyond the Pines. Like all American adventurers, that’s westward. But the place beyond the pines  is beyond not just the city and the loner mechanic’s trailer trash life. It’s beyond nature, beyond the physical environment, that elusive inner peace. Cianfrance’s romantic naivete finds satisfaction in the stoner loner’s fleeing his family for ... the rebel’s delusion of independence. 

Paradoxically, it’s Avery’s son AJ (Emory Cohen), not Jason, who has the thick-lipped petulance of Marlon Brando’s rebel motorcyclist in The Wild One. But AJ’s wildness is just the rich druggie’s delinquency, which he finally gives up to support his father’s campaign for office. Jason is the real rebel. But first, in another place beyond the pines, he compels Avery to realize his love for his son and to admit and to apologize for having orphaned Jason. In the old debate between Nature and Nurture, Cianfrance simply chooses Nature as the dominant force. As Luke’s absent father launched Luke’s solitude, son Jason opts for his absent father’s course, not the model provided by his very substantial adoptive father Kofi (Mahershala Ali).  

Much of this long film is encapsulated in the opening. The first shot is a long track that follows Luke from his bare chested solitary ritual preparations out to his public performance. Over two hours later that shot is echoed when Jason is tracked from behind as he walks in school, feeling the first stirrings of his father’s spirit. In both the individual track and in their parallel the point is continuity, an uninterrupted movement, like the passage of character from even an absent father to son. A second form of this continuity is the consequences of one’s action. Thus a playful one-night stand leads to Romina’s (Eva Mendes) pregnancy, the eventual discovery of which leads to Luke’s leaving the romantic life of the circus for ... the romantic life of the bank robber and the mythic shadow across his son’s life.

Perhaps the film’s key symbol is Luke’s circus act. He and two other cyclists are locked in a huge open steel mesh ball in which they speed up and around the sides narrowly avoiding collision. In that artificial, closed world Luke is triumphant. But in the outside real world the speeding trips intersect and the lives collide and crash. Outside the ball he goes too far, ruining his hopes to win back Romina, trying one bank job too many, dying in a bathetic fall from a window.