FILM SEPTEMBER 20, 2011
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He is called “Driver” on the wishful but forlorn principle that you only need to be what you do. He works in an auto repair shop in Los Angeles for a man named Shannon (Bryan Cranston), whose heavy limp bespeaks a bad history with the Mob. It is Shannon, acting as an amiable manager, who guides Driver into other jobs: doing stunts for movies; and driving the getaway car on serious robberies. Shannon has never met anyone as talented as Driver, which only means that Shannon has probably been too long in prison or the hospital to see the history of film noir where blank-faced actors have been reading too much French existentialism to learn their lines. He doesn’t know the seminal figure in this line of laconic grace, Alan Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967).
Ryan Gosling is Driver, and Gosling is one of the more unusual actors we have nowadays because he’s brave enough to give away so little in the way of character information, because he watches and listens, and because his gentle nature is unusually open to romance. So Driver’s compartmentalized professional anonymity is ruined when he sees a young woman, Irene (Carey Mulligan), who lives in his apartment building and nearly instantaneously determines she is the saint for whom he will behave with a self-destructive honor that might spring from the Arthurian legend.
The first half of Drive is good enough to make you heed A.O. Scott’s verdict that this is “the coolest movie around.” The first criminal job is brilliantly rendered in a way that teaches us how smart and nerve-free Driver is. The meeting with Irene (and the important adjunct, her young son, Benicio) is nearly silent, but an overwhelming chemistry builds between the adults. Gosling has done this before—in Blue Valentine and in The Notebook—and we are beginning to realize how rare Ms. Mulligan is. Though not a conventional beauty, she commands attention. Despite being English, she seems not just Angeleno but a wounded angel. Above all, she lets us in on so many unspoken thoughts. The Mom and the Driver are not a natural couple in life. Her husband is in prison, but he’s getting released in a week. Their bond is as much of a gesture to romantic fate as the way Driver drives—it’s obeying the machinery of noir as much as the young man is at peace with cars.
So as we’re getting through the first half of the picture, there’s time to appreciate that Drive is directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, and it won him the directors’ prize at the most recent Cannes Film Festival. Refn is Danish, but he spent his childhood in New York, and he has made some expert, nasty pictures before—Bronson and Valhalla Rising. More than that, Drive is written by Hossein Amini, whose previous credits include excellent adaptations of Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.
Amini, Refn, Gosling, and Mulligan are credentials—a lot of sophisticated horse-power under the hood—and for as long as it attempts to stay cool Drive is a riveting picture. Alas, it lets itself down. For as the plot gets tangled (and I cannot really spoil it because I never fully understood it), so the characters line up to be eliminated, but not in the subtle, original ways Refn brought to the film’s early car chases. Once the violence sets in, the most indispensable crew member is the guy delivering buckets of blood. It’s as if some producer (or group of producers) told the director that cool understatement and Bressonian restraint might tickle Cannes, but couldn’t we stick a fork in someone’s eye, couldn’t we really get into some blood and waste a lot of the talent?
The film obliges until not many of its lead actors are left alive, just as the ways of their going are hideously unexpected, cruel, and awash in the red stuff. I daresay the people behind the film would protest, look, this is the way the dirty world works, but Drive is as fanciful as a Roadrunner cartoon. What it had going for it was an uncanny and moving relationship between Gosling and Mulligan, and they would have every right to feel betrayed by the blood splash and the sudden discovery that Driver can turn very punitive. There is a scene in an elevator—a kissing scene and then a brutal stomping—that is characteristic, and reflective of the film’s arty ambition and indifference to suffering.
I don’t think I’m being squeamish, and I don’t intend to deny the excitement of violence. But on screen, brutality can be as stylized as dance. I don’t believe that directors like Refn, Scorsese, or Tarantino really know and live with such violence. I think they are protected softies, aroused by the fantasy of beautiful violence—like me, like so many of us. But I mistrust the macho swagger when the violence is ladled on like tomato sauce. Don’t use the infamous Jean-Luc Godard excuse—that the blood is merely red. The blood is life splashing in our face and it’s the commercial exploitation of cruelty done in the guise of a very “cool” movie.
The height of this search for toxic glamour is the sight and sound of Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman going through the motions of imitating your most chatty movie hoods rather in the way Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon impersonate actors in The Trip. It’s sad to see Brooks doing this. It’s not that he lets the film down, but he has spent his life attempting intelligent and humane comedies. This has never quite worked commercially, and I’m sure he needed a job at sixty-four. But he ought to know he’s getting away with murder.
As for Refn, he is loaded with skill, just like Driver, but where is his car going? Years ago, another European came to Los Angeles to do noir—John Boorman with Point Blank (1967)—and Boorman made us see the city with fresh eyes. Refn does that, too, but he never grasps the parable of professionalism redeemed by experience that drove Boorman.
David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder.
5 comments
I thought Albert Brooks was excellent in Drive, and I enjoyed the movie immensely though I agree with most of Mr. Thomson's other critiques. I enjoyed it from the opening homage to the long stretches of dialogue-free action & romance set pieces to the shocking bluntness of the beginning of the brutal rampage that unfortunately, as the body count rose, came to remind me of the worst aspect of the ending of The Departed. Upon a second viewing, I plan to test my theory that Gosling's Driver is perhaps slightly autistic or suffering from a [mostly] non-debilitating mental disorder. The mask motif and other less than subtle symbolic touches might distant his character from humanity further upon a third viewing, but I'll enjoy giving this movie that amount of attention.
It's rare for a movie to wear its influences on its sleeve so openly and yet also be successful as an original entry into the genre. Or maybe I just haven't yet gotten sick of this genre and the intense characters & plots that inhabit it.
I definitely am not sick of the kind of soundtrack we hear in Drive. Yes, it's cool, but it also feels totally 80s, and I'm glad to watch a decent 80s Michael Mann imitation in 2011.
- Konstantin
September 20, 2011 at 1:00am
Ick. The older I've gotten, the less patience I have for violence-as-entertainment in movies. I'm not afraid to admit that I'm squeamish. Why is squeamishness shameful? Surely the capacity to be entertained, and not bothered or troubled, by graphic violence is a far more worrisome character trait. I guess my attitudes have changed because death seems more real and cruelty seems more outrageous -- the overwhelming problem of our world, a serious one, not a pretty one to be trotted out for the entertainment of adolescents. I guess I'm also a little more attuned to reality and a little less patient with b.s. in fiction. At first, I was merely bored and irritated by the Godfather saga. (As in, who is that guy again?) Later in life, I found the romanticization of all those thugs morally dubious, and the movies' Serious Metaphor facile and unconvincing. No, we're not all part of the same hypocrisy, and, even if we were, hypocrisy is hardly the worst sin anyway. More and more, my attitude toward fictional assholes is not, "Oh, aren't *you* interesting." It's more like, "Fuck you, asshole." When your head's screwed on straight, don't you have to agree with Annabella Sciorra in Abel Ferrara's excellent gangster pic The Funeral? She says, in reference to her gangland family and friends, "They're criminals because they've never risen above their heartless, illiterate upbringing. And there's nothing, absolutely nothing, romantic about it.'' She might have added, "And nothing beautiful either." She could have also said "nothing cool," but the movie took place in the '30s. I guess it all depends on the context. Thomson says that this movie feels bogus. So it hasn't earned its violence. A movie has a right to be troubling and unpleasant, but only if it's true, because, yes yes, reality is troubling and unpleasant. If the movie is essentially doing violence or suffering for the fun of it -- the thrill of it -- then we have a sadism problem, and sadism isn't okay. It's cultural blight. Not every illicit feeling or fantasy "we" supposedly have need find expression in our art. The defense of such things is often that the artist/entertainer is not doing the bad thing, but rather talking *about* the bad thing -- an excuse subject to overuse and abuse.
- JakeH
September 20, 2011 at 5:30pm
Cultural blight? Maybe. In reality, violent crime is down significantly in the US the last several years. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20108251-504083.html http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/september/crime_091911/crime_091911 There are plenty of PG movies available for the squeamish.
- Konstantin
September 20, 2011 at 7:38pm
Also, the least entertaining parts of Drive are the violent outbursts, and I believe that cinematic choice was intentional. It's meant to be monstrous, jarring, unsettling, and it advances the characterizations; it is not thrilling or fun.
- Konstantin
September 20, 2011 at 7:42pm
Konstantin, I should probably shut up because I haven't seen the movie, but I will say that I have little interest in "politically correct" PG films. I can't remember the last PG film I saw, not counting The King's Speech, which I saw in its R-rated form, fucko intacta. I'll also say that I have no idea what the relationship is between violence in culture and fiction and violence in reality. Needless to say, just because violent crime is down doesn't mean that there's no relationship. For all I know, it might have gone down yet further absent depictions of "ultra-violence" -- a sickening phrase -- in movies and video games. Anyway, to say that sadism in fiction is a "cultural blight" is to say that it's bad for our *culture*, just like the latest piece-of-shit pop single to emerge from a corporate asshole. It's vulgar. It's soul-deadening. It denies humanity instead of affirming it in some way, or, at least, honestly exploring it (which, in itself, affirms it) -- telling ugly, fascinating truths, etc. One might suppose that a soulless culture could have some effect on our propensity to be actual soulless pricks in reality, or maybe reflect it, or maybe reinforce it, but I don't have the studies to back that up. We might think that all this fictional violence is the inevitable evolution of culture in a free, egalitarian society that, with each passing year, becomes less and less Victorian. Seen that way, it's akin to a decline in tie-wearing, and hardly alarming. We might also think that it's the inevitable evolution of culture in a capitalistic society that, with each passing year, becomes more and more focused on pleasing the tastes of little kids of all ages whose defining characteristic is their lack of taste. That's also not *very* alarming, but certainly disappointing. Kids should not be taught that they're half-baked notions and borderline psychopathic tendencies are standard. I like escapist entertainment as much as the next guy, but I abhor escapist entertainment that traffics in sadism. In that case, the thing is both false and disgusting -- pure obscenity. As for more serious art -- the stuff that's supposed to illuminate the human experience for real -- I would certainly not say that violence, graphic or otherwise, is per se inappropriate or off limits, but pretension or even honest intention won't necessarily get you off the hook. As Thomson does in this review, one may still ask, "What are you doing here, and why are you doing it?" and if the answer isn't good enough, we may be left to conclude legitimately that, instead of talking *about* cruelty, violence, or soullessness, the would-be art is instead *embodying* those things, even if it's not outwardly enjoying it.
- JakeH
September 22, 2011 at 12:28am