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How entertaining? ★★★★★
Thought provoking? ★★☆☆☆ 22 September 2011
This article is a review of DRIVE. |
“If I drive for you, you give me a time and a place. I give you a five-minute window, anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours no matter what. I don't sit in while you're running it down; I don't carry a gun... I drive,” Driver (Ryan Gosling).
DRIVE has been hyped ever since its Best Director win at Cannes, and my initial reaction as I left the screening was the feeling of being both impressed and mildly disappointed. One of those has grown, the other has lessened. The film has stuck with me – the story, the atmosphere, and the acting. The slight letdown has dissipated. This is up there with the great idiosyncratic car-chase films – VANISHING POINT; DIRTY MARY, CRAZY LARRY; and BULLITT. These all had strong stories and interesting characters, with the burning rubber being the concomitant for proceedings. It has to be mentioned of course its ancestry in Walter Hill’s THE DRIVER. Both share nameless, taciturn protagonists who are chauffeurs of the criminal getaway variety – doing this for unknown reasons. That and the stripped down storytelling are where their similarities end. Hill’s is a HEAT-esque cat and mouse grudge match between Bruce Dern’s cocky and tenacious cop, hunting Ryan O’Neal’s unsmiling and gifted wheelman. Director Nicolas Winding Refn’s pic, on the other hand, is a love story about a mysterious man who is a movie stuntman moonlighting as a car for hire. Gosling’s Driver falls for his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), and then her family.
DRIVE has been hyped ever since its Best Director win at Cannes, and my initial reaction as I left the screening was the feeling of being both impressed and mildly disappointed. One of those has grown, the other has lessened. The film has stuck with me – the story, the atmosphere, and the acting. The slight letdown has dissipated. This is up there with the great idiosyncratic car-chase films – VANISHING POINT; DIRTY MARY, CRAZY LARRY; and BULLITT. These all had strong stories and interesting characters, with the burning rubber being the concomitant for proceedings. It has to be mentioned of course its ancestry in Walter Hill’s THE DRIVER. Both share nameless, taciturn protagonists who are chauffeurs of the criminal getaway variety – doing this for unknown reasons. That and the stripped down storytelling are where their similarities end. Hill’s is a HEAT-esque cat and mouse grudge match between Bruce Dern’s cocky and tenacious cop, hunting Ryan O’Neal’s unsmiling and gifted wheelman. Director Nicolas Winding Refn’s pic, on the other hand, is a love story about a mysterious man who is a movie stuntman moonlighting as a car for hire. Gosling’s Driver falls for his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), and then her family.
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DRIVER subverts the conventions and our expectations. You presume him to be a Clint Eastwood-style reluctant hero, but he is in fact, it seems, looking for something heroic to do. Driver is a loner, but is also lonely. Irene and her child fill the void. Even when her husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) is released from prison you wonder when the fight over love will begin, but instead mutual civility and compassion rears its head. Then we have the gangsters of the piece – Bernie (Albert Brooks) and Nino (Ron Perlman). The former seems to play gentle souls, but here he does a Ben Kingsley in SEXY BEAST, and brings an untapped darkness to the role. Perlman is always so watchable. What a cast!! Add in Bryan Cranston and Christina Hendricks, and welcome to charisma central.
This is achingly romantic, unrepentantly violent, and thrilling stylish – surely a contender for the year’s best.
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