If you pay attention to movies, you may have heard that The Place Beyond the Pines (2012, directed by Derek Cianfrance) has a killer opening shot. It's one of those long tracking shots that will be inevitably compared to Welles. It's the kind of opening that announces the film as having an almost o'rweening ambition. In this shot, we follow carnival stunt rider Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling) as he stalks through the carnival on his way to the metal sphere in which he rides a motorcycle with two other riders. The shot itself is a stunt, but Cianfrance puts an exclamation point on it by placing an actual stunt at the end of it. Some films encompass their entire narratives in their opening shots, coded or not. This one does not code its narrative into the shot, or, rather, if it does, it only codes the first act of the movie: Ryan Gosling with jailhouse tattoos, the motorcycle, the moral squalor. Of the movie's overarching theme? There's nothing at all.
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