Drive
It’s hard keeping up with Ryan Gosling these days. He’s everywhere. He was amazing in Half Nelson, and amazing again years later in Blue Valentine. Both great films. Now he’s in every movie, and I can’t exactly tell what sort of career he’s creating (besides an obviously successful one) and which of his films are meant to be interesting. Sometimes it’s best to go into a movie blind. I didn’t know anything about Drive when I went to see it, except that (according to my buddy Erik, who took me to see it one day after his first viewing) it had a Sofia-Coppola-like ambient texture and pace. That sold me on it, as I adore mesmerizingly slow and arresting visual poetry. I’m big on the phrase feature-length music video.
But of course, Drive is not really like a Lost in Translation or Somewhere. It starts off with similar sensibilities to an extent: lush moodiness, casually remarkable camerawork, an immaculately curated atmospheric soundtrack. A distinct difference though, is Drive’s pointedly noir attitude. It’s sparse dialogue is more indebted to a tough Clint-Eastwood-esque efficiency than to a provocative auteur experimentalism. Also, almost immediately, the film is infused with dread, which slowly but surely unfolds itself.
The film coasts along in low gear for a while like a serene scenic drive, introducing peculiar characters, setting up basic plot points, until near the end of the second act, when it shifts gears into something decidedly higher and more confrontational. Guns are fired. Adrenaline. A splattered head. Heavy beating. It’s easy to think of our modern times as being desensitized to violence, but that’s because violence is generally depicted so callously, and with such little blood or evidence of pain. This is not that kind of violence. This feels very real. I’m gripped, and not by the narrative. Gosling’s protagonist makes some decisions that feel more like plot devices than genuine behavior, but I suppose when such a character has no name, no ties to anything or anyone, and no definitive moral compass, he can basically do whatever the plot necessitates. (This plot turns out to be of the bag-of-money/death-list variety.)
There are songs that start with a quiet piano or acoustic guitar and whispered vocal that then crash into loud, pounding rock. Drive doesn’t feature these sort of songs, but it behaves like them. Restrained quiet and fierce energy make for a satisfying juxtaposition - one that translates into film almost just as well (though nothing is more primal and directly satisfying as music.) The third act of Drive is hard rock (or heavy metal, or maybe gangster rap), with bits of symphonic beauty tied in for cohesiveness. The soundtrack itself sticks to wonderful electronic tones and 80s synth pop nods.
There’s one particular scene in which Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn has borrowed nicely from Vincent Gallo (Buffalo ‘66) for a surreal romantic moment, in which time seems to stop so that we may savor it, and from Gaspar Noé (Irreversible) for a brutal pounding in of somebody’s face. (Indeed, Noé was consulted for this shot.) The love and hate happen right next to each other. The outcome is quite delightful. This scene is the film in a nutshell.
Drive is an interesting, distinctively post-modern movie. It uses retro stylization, almost camp in its declarative force - a cursive font in bright pink is used for credits and promotion - and music to match. It takes a page or three from the Quentin Tarantino book on film - heavy in references, heavy in cherry-picked near-exploitive period specificity (the 80s in this case), heavy in gore and revenge fantasy fulfillment. It turns between atmospheric beauty and hyper-graphic violence quite adroitly. I am quite pleased by all of these things. Ultimately, though, this film is glossy trash, proudly announcing itself as style over substance. I don’t strictly mean this as an insult. It’s Marshall McLuhan’s (and the Republican party’s mantra) style as substance. Substance matters, but style matters more. I actually most often prefer it myself. My fear is that, with such excesses in celebration of style, we might forget that we still live in a world where substance matters a great deal. Do we even know what it looks like anymore?
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