Movie Review: Drive

 
Drive

Genre: Action… sort of
Rating: R
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, Christina Hendricks, and Bryan Cranston

Description: A Hollywood stunt performer who moonlights as a wheelman discovers that a contract has been put on him after a heist gone wrong.

 
Don’t go see Drive expecting a bunch of car chases. It’s not what the movie’s about. If anything, it’s kind of a fairy tale version of Taxi Driver. If you buy a ticket to Drive because you want to see an action movie, you’ll be very, very disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is great at action. The driving sequence that takes up the first ten minutes of the film is absolutely wonderful film-making. But there’s a lot of Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan staring at each other and him taking five minutes to answer a simple question. A lot. It’s kind of Lost in Translation as an action movie. If that’s not what you’re looking for, you’ll hate the movie the way most of the our theater did.

Nicolas Winding Refn is making his move to Hollywood here, after a successful career directing thrillers in Denmark since the 1990s. His style is weird, and European. The titles are in this crazy pink Sixteen Candles-ish font, and the film is (sometimes incongruously) scored with 80s pop music. I liked that part of it. Refn elevates the Steve McQueen-esque old school action hero to fairy tale knight in this film, and I like that idea. Gosling’s nameless driver wears a white jacket with a golden scorpion on the back. It feels like his armor, no matter how beat it up it gets over the course of the movie.

I should probably try to describe the plot of Drive, though I also don’t want to give much away about the way things develop. Gosling plays an extremely stoic Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals. He is very good at what he does, as we see in the film’s awesome opening sequence. He meets his next-door neighbor, played by Mulligan, who made her big debut on Doctor Who and later received critical acclaim for her role in An Education. Their relationship takes over the movie, for good or ill.

Of course, Mulligan’s damsel is eventually put in distress through a circuitous but somehow inevitable turn of events, and the film’s slow middle section eventually devolves into a series of ultra-violent bursts. Also involved are a pair of gangsters played by Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman, as well as a well-meaning mechanic played by Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston. All of the actors give strong performances, and Refn’s camerawork and visual style are uniformly interesting to watch. There are frozen moments in Drive where the frame is a work of art.

And yet it’s all so very hard to describe. Here’s another crack at it: you know Quentin Tarantino’s films, right? The ones that assume you’ve seen every movie ever and don’t quite take themselves seriously and are visually gorgeous and are filled with crackling dialogue. Imagine the opposite. A movie that homages genre classics but seems extremely reluctant to have any on-screen dialogue if it can possibly help it. A film that is in love with its own artiness but in a quiet way as opposed to an in-your-face, title-cards-flashing-on-screen kind of way.

But I’m making Drive sound like a great film, when I’m not sure it is. I mean, I’ve heard other critics say things like “Drive says more in its silences than ten other movies say with words.” No, no it doesn’t. Yes, they’re saying something by making Gosling’s character wait before speaking, but they don’t need to take up half an hour of movie to say it. The film is incredibly slow-moving and frustrating in the way it starts with its best bit. You keep waiting for them to come back to that opening sequence and they just… never do. Everyone involved with Drive knows exactly what they’re doing, and there are several really great bits in the film. I’d personally much rather see a really weird take on this material like Drive than a really generic take on the same material. But I’m just not sure I can recommend the movie to the average movie-goer, or if I’d ever want to watch the film again. That’s not a good sign.
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