Drive (2011) ****/*****
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 Drivepay 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.
