Drive puts me in
the interesting position of loving a film, but not being able to recommend it
to very many people. The aspects of filmmaking that I’m most enamored with are
performance and crafting, and this movie has those in spades. It’s all about
giving great actors unique characters to play around with and showing off the
visual genius of director Nicolas Winding Refn. Drive is exactly my idea of a good time at the movies. But I find
that the aspects of filmmaking most mainstream audiences are enamored with are
story and spectacle. The first questions many people are likely to ask when you
tell them you’ve seen a good movie are, “What’s it about?” or “How are the
special effects? To these people, Drive is
going to be a pretty big disappointment.
What’s it about? It’s about a guy named simply Driver (Ryan
Gosling), who drives for a living, both as a Hollywood stuntman and a crime
syndicate wheelman. Nothing unexpected happens to him. He’s a real
professional, has his own set of rules, but then he meets a girl named Irene
(Carey Mulligan) and his new relationship leads to sloppiness. Suddenly he finds
himself in a deadly situation. It’s all pretty uninspired stuff. How are the special effects? There
aren’t many, really. There are some cool car chases and some splattery, violent
gore, but nothing that is going to drop your jaw. The cars all actually exist
and do things that real cars can do. You won’t get a scene of a CG hot rod
ramping off of a building and exploding a helicopter. The deaths are bloody and
brutal, but in a straightforward, mundane way. The deaths aren’t the point.
People get shot or stabbed; they’re not strapped to the front of a car and ran
through a hundred panes of glass or anything. Drive has a lot more in common with a forgotten action film from
the mid 70s you might come across on cable late at night than it does any of
the big event films tearing up the multiplex these days.
Actually, this is a movie that’s very quiet and slow paced
for much of its runtime. We spend a lot of time with Driver while he’s fixing
cars, driving around at night, or watching TV with Irene’s son Benicio (Kaden
Leos). You’ve got to be very patient to get to the action scenes. But when you
get there, they’re more than worth it. Drive
foregoes big time stunts in favor of nail biting tension. When the film
opens, Driver is the wheelman on a robbery. The guys pulling the job have five
minutes to get in and out, and we’re always aware of the ticking clock. Once
the cops catch wind of what’s going on, it’s time for Driver to show off his
skills. What we get is less a chase sequence, and more a game of hide and seek.
Driver knows the city streets like no other. He listens to the police radio,
avoiding intersections that get name-dropped. He watches out for the police
helicopter’s spotlight and avoids its gaze, ducking under bridges and behind
buildings. It’s a unique take on the movie car chase that I had never seen
before, and despite having such a pedestrian plot, that’s one of the things
that this movie does really well; showing you things that you’ve never seen
before.
Most of where that originality comes from is just in the
film’s aesthetics and in its cool factor. The lights and shadows of L.A. at
night are gorgeous when seen through Refn and cinematographer Newton Thomas
Sigel’s lens. It’s like they polished the city before they filmed it. And accompanying
that glossy image is the film’s soundtrack, a mix of synthey, ethereal mood
music composed by Cliff Martinez and a handful of electro pop songs that
wouldn’t feel at home in any other action movie that I’ve ever seen. Watching Drive often feels like spending time at
an upscale nightclub. As we follow Driver around and learn about his routine,
the capable camera work always keeps the image interesting, even when not much
is happening. There are a lot of fade ins and fade outs transitioning scene to
scene, the movie bleeds together creating a dreamlike experience. If you go
into Drive expecting anything that
remotely resembles The Fast and the
Furious, then you’re going to be bored out of your mind. But if you go in
expecting an art film told in an action movie framework, then you’ll come away
pleased.
That takes care of the technical aspects of the film, so
what about the performances? All you should need to do is look at a cast list
to know that they’re pitch perfect from top to bottom. At this point, it should
be clear to everyone that Ryan Gosling is one of the best working actors in
Hollywood. Even on the rare occasions when I haven’t been into what he’s doing,
I always have to give him credit for making interesting choices with his roles
and never sleepwalking through jobs. Driver is a character who goes to extreme
places over the course of this film, he is the sort who by all accounts should
be a bit of an adrenaline junkie, but Gosling plays him stone faced and
emotionless. He’s a man of few words and even fewer feelings. In most hands,
that approach would have ended up being pretty boring, but Gosling is always
able to give you just enough to keep Driver an intriguing enigma. We don’t know
where he came from or how he got to be the way he is, but we always want to
keep watching to find out more.
Carey Mulligan is another actor well on her way to
establishing herself as one of the top talents in the world. Even when I’ve
seen her in movies I didn’t like, she was always the bright spot. One of the
things that she’s really good at is projecting warmth and giddiness through her
face, and watching her play cutesy opposite Gosling’s Driver, who you couldn’t
bleed an ounce of enthusiasm out of, made for an entertaining back and forth.
Paula Abdul famously said that opposites attract, and that theory is never
proven any more true than it is here. And even when that initial getting to
know you sequence between Driver and Irene is over, when bad things start
happening and horrors are witnessed, Mulligan plays those moments perfectly as
well. She can contort her face from pleased to pained with just a slight tweak
of expression. Emotion just bleeds out of this girl’s eyes.
Gosling and Mulligan are helped along by a ridiculously
strong cast of supporting characters as well. The always likable Bryan Cranston
plays Driver’s boss/manager Shannon. In Cranston’s hands Shannon is a sort of
dirty, criminal version of Jack Lemmon’s desperate Shelley from Glengarry Glen Ross, and he’s at the
same time both fun and heartbreaking to watch in the doomed role. Ron Pearlman
and Albert Brooks show up as a couple of Mafioso types that Driver becomes
entangled with, and both of these guys go a long way toward making the well
tread crime plot portion of the film watchable. Just seeing Pearlman wearing a
suit is fun. I’m so used to seeing him play the monster that even just tweaking
that persona to play a goon felt refreshing. He even gets a couple moments of
bravado that seemed to be straight out of Nic Cage’s eccentric playbook, and
they made me howl with laughter. Albert Brooks plays his character with a
menace and dangerous edge that definitely felt against type for him. If there’s
any real villain in this movie, it’s Brooks, and every razor slashing moment
that he’s on screen is filled with tension just because of his presence. Who
knew the guy from The Scout could be
so scary?
Speaking of those razor slashing moments, I guess some
mention should be made of how over the top the violence is. It’s really
inappropriate. Half of the people who don’t like this movie will say that it’s
too boring, and the other half will say that it’s too violent. The violence
always comes at a price though. It’s not just here to shock or titillate. In
typical Noir fashion, the characters of Drive
pay for their sins. Once a moral code gets breached you typically find your
whole world crashing down around you. Driver himself goes much further than any
inherently good person could, and a large part of what the third act deals with
is him tying up what few loose strings get left of a scorched Earth. I guess
that’s where the genre blending comes in. For the first half we are in the
framework of a typical lone samurai/hitman movie, and then in the second half Drive becomes your archetypal crime
film. It’s only in presentation that the movie manages to be unique. This is a true example of style over
substance. But what style.
