Drive
I have got to start writing these things in a more timely manner. Gets kind of hard to write reviews after a couple of weeks... a couple subsequent movie viewings stacked on top... and a ten day vacation. Oh well, nothing I can do now but give this my best effort going forward...
So yeah, Drive. In a word, awesome. A great movie. Loved the hell out of it...as much as anyone can love the hell out of a super intense, ultra violent crime caper flick. But then, when you have a movie this well made, I suppose the subject matter isn't as much of a concern as the artistry on screen. In any event, Drive is definitely the best movie I had seen in months... not that that's saying much. But there you have it.
Put another way, Drive is every bit the movie that the 2010 George Clooney flop The American could and possibly should have been. The two are rather similar movies: both feature an undercurrent that focuses on the somewhat desolate isolation of the main characters, both are shot in an artistic way, and so on and so forth. Where Drive manages to come out ahead is in its story-telling. Nicolas Winding Refn manages to build an incredible slow burning intensity into Drive whereas Anton Corbijn allows for an overwhelming and yawn-inducing mopiness to smother his film. Where Drive's Ryan Gosling is absolutely mesmerizing, riveting viewers to the screen with his every move, George Clooney aimlessly floated through his story, as though he was waiting for the end credits to catch up to his state of mind. Clooney's Jack/Edward character could definitely have used a sip of whatever it was that Gosling's Driver character was drinking to cast aside that perpetual sulk.
Actually, what also separates the two films is the supporting cast. Here, again, Corbijn and company do the film no favors. Where Clooney's Jack/Edward is left to hopelessly interact with the likes of a platitude-spouting clergyman, Gosling's Driver gets to spar with Albert Brooks' and Ron Perlman's gangster's and Bryan Cranston's excellent take on Driver's mentor/agent/manager whose only luck seems to be bad...or worse. All the actors here work together to further the film's slow burning intensity without ever bringing a hammy-ness to the screen that would have killed such momentum. It's a great recipe for a great film. I imagine it would have been easy to sprinkle the movie with chronic over-actors hell-bent on smacking the audience over the head with the idea that there is some intense shit going down here. (Even though I love him, insert Jeremy Piven for Albert Brooks and you'd essentially achieve the end I'm describing here... and ruin the movie at the same time). Instead, Refn hands the screen over to actors content to issue performances of a rather cool restraint- much to the film's benefit. Subtlety would seem to be the key here.
I'm probably doing Drive a major disservice my comparing it to a far inferior movie in The American. I guess the question I should be asking is whether Drive holds up in its own right. Yes, it does. Absolutely. The story is riveting, the performances are easily top-notch (including the heretofore unmentioned Carey Mulligan who seems utterly incapable of coming off as anything other than charming, fresh, and- of course- cute... in fact almost too cute here), and the tone is right. I guess it says something that you can pretty much figure out generally where the movie has to inevitably head and yet you find yourself completely riveted to the screen. It occurs to me that I've done a shitty job of explaining the plot- what the story actually is- even though I keep insisting that it is pretty fantastic. I can try to give it a go here. Drive follows the story of a young man (Ryan Gosling) scraping by in the double life of a Hollywood stunt driver and automobile mechanic (by day) and criminal getaway driver (by occasional night). The kid- known only as "the driver" or "kid" in the movie- seems resigned to this hardscrabble life of relative isolation surrounded by two-bit gangsters (including his unlucky mentor/agent/manager Shannon- played in an incredible performance by Bryan Cranston. By the end you can just smell the desperation brought on by a lifetime of missteps... and an utter refusal to learn from the past). In fact, for the most part during the onset of the movie, you never can quite get at what makes the driver tick- other than the thrill of the chase. He's a blank slate wandering through his days and nights unless he's behind the wheel of a car particularly when he's outwitting hopeless police pursuers. All this seems to change when he meets and starts falling for his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her young son (Kaden Leos). All at once a new side of the kid emerges, one that burns for something other than the thrill of the chase, one that sees a need to perhaps leave the life of scraping by behind, one that sees a need to take care of the young woman and her son. It is this desire to take care of and provide for Irene that leads to driver getting mixed up in a crime caper that puts him in over his head (Driver is typically the one in control- which is just the way he needs things) leading to a violent, high stakes game of cat and mouse with some petty gangsters (Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman). As you can probably guess, bad things end up happening here. For a bundle of different people too. As I've said, as you watch the movie, you generally can get a sense of exactly where the movie needs to end up, but even such as that is, you can't force yourself to look away... even if you wanted to. And that is the mark of expert acting and storytelling.
Much has been made of how shockingly- if casually- violent the movie is. And it is that. But I didn't find it so over the top as to be distracting. Maybe that's just because I was completely drawn in by Gosling's (in particular, but also the rest of the cast) completely engrossing performance. Or maybe I'm just completely desensitized to violence of such a scale (and am a doomed, lost soul). What ever the case may be, I'd hope that folks could manage to quit focusing on trivial matters like the level of violence featured here and tune in to a much more important concern such as exactly how incredible the movie is on the whole.
Grade: A+
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