It's all work and no payoff for indie wunderkind Ryan Gosling this time around. Elizabeth Kerr reports.

In the movies, the relationship between mothers and daughters is often defined by high drama and fraught with emotionally competitive intensity. This hysterical dynamic - in the true Greek sense of the word - goes back to Euripides and his ilk; it's a classic. On the other hand, the father-son connection is one rooted in tragedy (Euripides like this too), masculine self-determination and sense of duty. We're all meant to believe there's something inherently compelling about this search for manhood in a post-feminist (ha!) world. Where women trying to deal with their mothers' legacies do so via singing Motown songs into hairbrushes and weeping, men deal with their dads through melancholy crime and desperate stabs at redemption.

Director Derek Cianfrance caused a stir in 2010 with his painfully clear-eyed portrait of a failing marriage in Blue Valentine. In The Place Beyond the Pines, Cianfrance reunites with Ryan Gosling for a neo-noirish, multi-generational wannabe epic about the sins of fathers pressing upon their sons, guilt, responsibility, masculinity, moral corruption and the karmic burden of bad decisions. It's ambitious to say the least.

Motorbike stunt performer Luke (Gosling, doing Drive lite) returns to dead end Schenectady while on tour and finds an old flame, Romina (Eva Mendes), has had a baby. Luke wants to man up and be a good father, but his dearth of life skills leave him little choice but bank robbery as a source of income. This brings across cop Avery's (Bradley Cooper doing frumpy) beat one day, and their encounter goes about as well as you expect it would. The film then abruptly shifts to a second act that focuses on Luke's son Jason (Dane DeHaan, Chronicle, the next Spider-man's Harry Osborn) and his search for identity - his own and his father's. Without giving too much away, Luke and Avery are fated to meet once again, metaphorically or otherwise.

The Place Beyond the Pines has a mesmerizing quality to it that occasionally trumps the core familiarity of the story and the often-overwrought (yet somehow simultaneously low key) tragedy that isn't as unexpected as Cianfrance thinks it is. The parallels and omens are poured on thick, and the latent, misguided honor of all these men leaves no room for ambiguity or nuance. As a study in reaping what you sow and bearing the burdens of a father's actions it's certainly grandiose, but that grandiosity ultimately renders the film oddly inert. It could use a little hysteria.

The Place Beyond the Pines opened in Hong Kong on Thursday.

AJ (Emory Cohen) and Jason's (Dane DeHaan) friendship has a history before it even starts in The Place Beyond the Pines

(HK Edition 09/27/2013 page7)