chris kilby
Posts: 1189
Joined: 31/3/2010
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Moody, intense and cooler than Fonzie, Drive is Thief meets The Driver. In fact, it’s the best film Michael Mann never made.
Virtually a hymn to 80s cool right down to the sub-Tangerine Dream synth-pop score, it’s also a monument to 80s naff-ness; electric pink “handwritten” (ie, illegible) neon credits and the sort of hideous satin bomber jacket and leather driving gloves combo favoured by Alan Partridge – ah-ha!
Taciturn Ryan Gosling looks like a cross between a young Peter Stormare and Stan Laurel and is so like his namesake Ryan O’Neal in The Driver (both are nameless and neither carries a gun) that I kept expecting Bruce Dern’s twitchy cop to show up.
Like O’Neal, Gosling’s “Driver” is almost an urban samurai with his own inscrutable moral code - albeit a badly dressed samurai. Like Le Samurai meets Vanishing Point. Which means it’s all but impossible to talk about Drive without invoking existentialism. Whatever that means.
Drive is also an urban western of sorts with more than a touch of Shane about it. He protected a family too. A random act of kindness (albeit an unconventional one) which leads to all sorts of complications for The Driver With No Name. Chaos theory in action – a butterfly must have flapped its wings in 1985!
Enigma or cipher? Hero or psycho? “Driver” is icily impassive. Disturbingly so. The more violent he gets the more impassive he becomes. “You look like a zombie, kid.” Although that creepy mask makes him look more like Michael Myers. Or Jason Statham. Uh-oh – psycho alert!
“Driver” is more a collection of undeniably cool if psychopathic quirks than a real flesh and blood character. There is no sense that he has a life beyond the confines of the screen or had a past before the cameras started rolling. Baby-faced Gosling is aptly named for he looks far too young to have accumulated the impressive skills and experience his character has.
Inscrutable and fatalistic, this psycho with an apparent death wish is yer classic doomed, neo(n)-noir antihero (complete with hard-boiled voiceover at the start which wryly turns out to be half a telephone conversation) albeit an unconventionally pro-active one. Especially when it comes to a bit of unorthodox DIY involving a hammer. And, stunt man by day, getaway driver by night, there’s more than a quirky hint of another Fall Guy and 80s icon – Colt Seavers!
As the young mum in need of rescue, the possibly overrated Carey Mulligan has come a long way since Bleak House and Doctor Who a few years ago. While I do kinda wonder what all the fuss is about, the camera does love her. Nice to see flame-haired, Amazonian goddess, Christina Hendricks, in modern clothes for a change. What was it Jack Lemmon said about another screen goddess? Like jello on springs?
And even nicer to see Big Ron Perlman out of the prosthetics for a change. One of his occasional, none-too-bright, minor Mafia hoods, his “belligerent asshole with his back against the wall” is a cross between Nice Guy Eddie and the foul-mouthed thug Perlman played in Cronos.
The increasingly ubiquitous Bryan Cranston looks like an emaciated Peter Mullan in the doomed Willie Nelson-in-Thief role. Between this and Breaking Bad it’s hard to believe Cranston used to be typecast as the Homer-like dad in Malcolm in the Middle. Maybe he’s started a new trend. Having said that, Albert Brooks was Hank Scorpio!
Looking like a cross between Robert DeNiro and Ken Barlow of all people, Brooks is a malevolent revelation cast spectacularly against perennial nice guy/loser type as a ruthless (if wistful) razor-wielding gangster who’d give Tommy “Funny How?” DeVito a run for his money in the explosive psycho stakes. What would Nemo say? I dunno, but he’d have done what he was bloody well told if his dad was as terrifying as this!
With the sudden bursts of wince-inducing violence and some of the best old school driving action since Ronin, Drive is a film which stays with you. Yet it is strangely ethereal and dreamlike for so brutal a thriller. Haunting isn’t the word. There are plenty of evocative low angles, endless tracking shots which seem to float through the air, and mesmerising close-ups where you can almost see what the inscrutable Gosling is thinking.
Drive casts a hypnotic spell all its own, like a lucid dream or something. Is what we’re watching supposed to be “real”? There are deliberate echoes of Point Blank also – another dreamlike take on a hard-boiled American genre by a European director. Especially that ambiguous ending…
The importance of Drive’s incredible synth score cannot be overestimated. Stark and uber-cool, it simply wouldn’t be the same film without it. I’m struggling to think of another movie where the mood is so dependent on the music. Where the music IS the film. Blade Runner, perhaps. Or Halloween. Indeed, the distinctive minimalist ambience of Vangelis and John Carpenter were clearly a huge influence on Cliff Martinez and co.
This overwhelming soundscape makes the many prolonged silences all the more powerful. Drive is almost as stylised and ritualistic as Noh theatre. Stylised and stylish. Maybe too stylish? Where the same director’s Bronson was defiantly (and literally) theatrical, this is pure cinema, and virtually silent cinema for long stretches.
The already iconic songs variously give Driver a voice and ironically comment on him: “There’s something about you. Something inside,” alright. (So iconic two of them were pilfered by Taken 2 and there’s hardly a trailer on TV at the moment which doesn’t feature that song!)
The robotic vocoder effects and dreamy voices intoning about being “a real human” suggest that Gosling isn’t human. A cold, aloof psycho – it’s always the quiet ones. Yet he is ultimately motivated by empathy at great personal cost to himself. A real hero after all.
Nicholas Winding Refn is clearly a director who isn’t afraid to wear his influences on his sleeve. But not in the empty, immature, ultimately fanboyish manner of a Tarantino. He is far more grown-up and frankly cooler than that. No matter how deliriously OTT his films get there is a curious reserve and chilly self-restraint to them as well. Must be a Scandinavian thing.
Refn could show Tarantino a thing or two. Drive is a much better film than Death Proof which it also superficially resembles. And I don’t just mean that fucking awful jacket! Unlike Tarantino’s irresponsible, if entertainingly cartoonish, approach Refn’s violence is rightly shocking and comes out of nowhere. Just like real violence which makes you want to shut your eyes not fall about laughing.
Refn instinctively knows that if drama is conflict and conflict is violence, then violence is drama in its purest form. Like boxing. Or gladiatorial combat. And I’m intrigued by his highfallutin’ talk about cinema violence as an artform. Kinda makes me wonder what he’s going to do next. Definitely one to watch. Whoever it was that turned this guy down when he asked for a directing gig on Doctor Who must feel a bit of a fool now…
Nicholas Winding Refn is clearly a huge Michael Mann fan. Thief especially, which is just too ironic for words. Like Thief, Drive is cynical yet romantic, hard-boiled yet sentimental, gritty yet dreamlike. It seems to exist in an ethereally-scored, neon-lit netherworld at one remove from reality – it’s a Mann’s world alright.
There’s the same sense of place you get with Mann. LA almost feels alive. And Refn’s just as in love with the place - to the point watching Drive almost made me feel unfaithful!
Yet Drive is not a slavish imitation of a Michael Mann film, for there is one crucial difference and it is the difference between earnest American and more ironic European sensibilities. Not exactly renowned for his sense of humour, Mann takes his films very seriously, treating his characters like heroic archetypes and elevating their exploits to the level of pulp myth. But Refn is too wryly knowing for that. Paul Verhoeven was the same although his end results were radically different and even more gruesome.
An interesting character in his own right, in a lot of ways Refn’s as cool and aloof as his leading man. But above all, he is ambivalent to the point of being tongue-in-cheek. Is it possible that, as with Bronson (a merciless parody of despicable celebrity criminal culture), the none-more-sardonic Nicholas Winding Refn is subversively taking the piss out of yet another protagonist by suggesting that heroes are psychos?
I expect Michael Mann is bemused if not flattered by all this. Or, you know, talking to his attorney…
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RE: Brutal, beautiful, brilliant. - 
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