Summary

• Ryan Gosling's standout performance in Blue Valentine showcases his real acting chops and emotional range.
• Director Derek Cianfrance's collaborative process with Gosling led to authentic and raw performances in their films.
• Gosling's role in The Place Beyond the Pines showcases a fully realized character and his ability to balance subtlety and intensity.

When Hollywood needs a superstar, it often calls upon one man: Ryan Gosling. Gosling's career exploded in 2011, largely thanks to the neo-noir thriller Drive, in which the talented actor played a stuntman by day and a getaway driver by night. Drive turned Gosling into a superstar long after 2004's The Notebook provided his breakthrough role. However, the A-list actor's best performance may very well come from a different film: 2010's Blue Valentine.

Directed by Derek Cianfrance, Blue Valentine is the polar opposite of The Notebook. It tells a realistic love story that provides a window into the deteriorating relationship between a husband and his wife. Gosling's sensational performance in that film, spurred by his director's demands, alerted the world that this former Mickey Mouse Club member had real chops. Then, three years after the release of Blue Valentine, Gosling and Cianfrance reunited for their greatest movie: The Place Beyond the Pines.

How Did Ryan Gosling Get His Start in Hollywood?

By Paying His Dues, Believing in Himself, and Investing in Plastics

Some of Ryan Gosling's oldest fans learned about him long before he was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Barbie. At the start of Gosling's career, he was just a talented kid showing off his entertainment skills in Disney's variety series, Mickey Mouse Club — the same series that made stars out of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Justin Timberlake. Following his time in the Mouse House, Gosling jumped into the world of Greek mythology, starring in the title role of Fox Kids Young Hercules, which was canceled after its initial 50-episode season.

Following his brush with television fame, Ryan Gosling intended to become a legitimate dramatic actor. However, he found transitioning from being a kids' television star to the world of movies difficult. His agent even dropped him for daring to pursue more serious work. Eventually, Gosling's breakout arrived in 2004 with The Notebook, nearly surpassing Titanic as the film that touched the heart of every hopeless romantic it encountered.

Rather than capitalize on his newly-earned heartthrob status, Ryan Gosling tried to distance himself from it, starring in unusual films like Stay, Half Nelson, and Lars and the Real Girl. Through every single one of those films, one thing became clear: Ryan Gosling is at his best when playing a character who is actively struggling to keep their emotions in check.

It's hard to know whether Ryan Gosling also realized how well he was suited for these roles. However, the choices he would continue to make as an actor in his selected roles suggest that he was as aware of this as anyone. It was exactly that type of character that led to his two most impressive performances of all time, Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines.

Who is Director Derek Cianfrance?

A Filmmaker with an Artistic Pedigree

Director Derek Cianfrance began making movies as a teenager. When he got a bit older, he headed to the University of Colorado to study film under the tutelage of avant-garde filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon. His first feature film, Brother Tied, arrived in 1998 when Cianfrance was just 23 years old but never saw a wide release, despite the film traveling to over 30 festivals and winning awards like The Orson Welles First Feature Film Award at the Huntington Film Festival.

Hailed as a "visual genius," Derek Cianfrance soon ventured into documentary filmmaking, exploring various subjects for both film and television, including portraits of musicians like Cassandra Wilson, Mos Def, and Run DMC. Then, ten years after his first narrative feature, Cianfrance began preparing for his second: Blue Valentine.

What Makes Ryan Gosling's Blue Valentine Performance Special?

It's Eminently Relatable

It took Derek Cianfrance 12 years to bring Blue Valentine to the big screen. The film explores a couple, Dean and Cindy (played by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, respectively), as they shift between two periods of time: the beginning of their romance and a few years later, when they're married parents facing financial difficulties. Dean is a dreamer with little ambition who's simply happy to share his life with someone. Meanwhile, Cindy is a nurse, dreaming of a better life for herself and her family. In short, they're two people moving in opposite directions. Ryan Gosling's incredibly nuanced performance charms the audience with how effortlessly Dean's affection comes through in moments of light-hearted goofiness, like an impromptu ukelele serenade. But it's just as readily apparent that Dean doesn't want (or know how) to move forward when trying to be a better father or husband.

What makes Gosling's performance so successful is that the actor never exaggerates Dean to such an extent that he becomes the stereotypical inattentive husband. Instead, he finds ways to ensure the audience will pity his predicament, unleashing devastating raw emotion that crystalizes how a passion that once burned so brightly can slip through one's fingers. Taken as a whole, Blue Valentine is achingly beautiful, heartbreaking, and desperate, much like the relationship between its two lead characters. Derek Cianfrance shot the movie with a hand-held camera to ensure it had a dynamic, realistic quality. Moreover, Cianfrance pushed his actors to uncomfortable lengths to get what he needed. For instance, Cianfrance split the filming of the movie into three parts. The earliest shooting days were devoted to capturing the flashback sequences that showed Dean and Cindy in love, while the end of the shoot was for when the relationship finally came apart at the seams. However, the middle part of the shoot was the most interesting.

For the film's middle portion, Cianfrance demanded that Gosling and Williams move into the same house their characters lived in, along with the child actor who plays their daughter, Frankie. The three actors lived together for over a month, with Michelle Williams returning each night to the home she shared with her real-life daughter, Matilda. Thanks to this outside-the-box approach, Ryan Gosling lost sight of the fact that he was making a film; however, it wasn't the only extreme method Cianfrance resorted to.

During another sequence in Blue Valentine, Dean is walking on the Brooklyn Bridge, trying to get Cindy to tell him a secret. When filming the sequence, Cianfrance made Gosling promise to do whatever it took to have Williams tell him the secret. To complicate matters, he also told Williams not to tell Gosling the secret no matter what. When it came time to shoot the scene, Gosling couldn't get Williams to break. So, in a moment of inspiration, Gosling climbed to the top of the bridge's safety fence, causing Williams to immediately relent and spill Cindy's secret. Gosling climbed back down, but the film's producers were upset that he had taken such a significant risk. That moment of improvisation encapsulates what makes Ryan Gosling and Derek Cianfrance such kindred artistic spirits. Both are willing to go to unusual and extreme lengths to capture the story they want to tell. And after the critical success they found with Blue Valentine, they'd re-team once more.

What Makes Ryan Gosling's The Place Beyond the Pines Performance So Special?

It's Edgy, Dynamic, and Fully Formed

Released two years after Blue Valentine, Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines is a slower, subtler, and much more dramatic version of Ryan Gosling's star-making performance in Drive. This film again sees Gosling playing a stunt driver who turns to a life of crime. Although The Place Beyond the Pines never made an impact as significant as Drive, Gosling's performance in the former is far superior.

The Place Beyond the Pines is a multi-generational crime thriller that tells the story of two intertwined men and the legacy they leave behind for their sons. The latter section of the film concerns itself with Bradley Cooper, playing an ambitious public servant whose sons struggle with drug addiction; unfortunately, this section provides a conclusion to the film that isn't as powerful or effective as the first part, in which Gosling is the focus. Compared to the Driver in Drive, Gosling's character in Pines, Luke, is a fully fleshed-out and realized person. This isn't to say that Luke isn't quiet and brooding because he most definitely is. However, he's also something else: comfortable in his skin. During Pines's dramatic introduction to Luke, the audience meets a man with tattoos, bleached hair, and an overall demeanor that suggests he is entirely in control of his environment.

Eventually, that calm demeanor begins to slip when Luke discovers that a woman he had a past relationship with (played by Gosling's real-life wife, Eva Mendes) has given birth to his son. Rather than abandon his child, Luke is determined to stick around, even if his son's new stepdad wants nothing to do with him. Unfortunately, Luke meets a mechanic, played by Ben Mendelsohn, who convinces him that he needs to steal to provide for his family. When he attempts to follow through on that advice, Luke finds the thrill of committing a crime addicting. Where the film goes from there shouldn't be spoiled, but needless to say, it's not a happy ending.

When Ryan Gosling embarked upon the role of Luke in The Place Beyond the Pines, he had already proved he could do subtle and heartbreaking in films like Half Nelson and, of course, Blue Valentine. In Drive, he also proved that he could be undeniably cool. In Pines, he brought together all the disparate elements that make him a talented actor in one film. It's a fascinating, restrained, and, at times, elaborate performance that only lasts one-third of the movie but remains utterly unforgettable. While Gosling has come close to recapturing some of this magic in films like Blade Runner 2049 and First Man, he's never topped this one-two punch he perfected earlier in his career alongside Derek Cianfrance.