On paper, you might look at Drive—the 2011 critical darling from
director Nicolas Winding Refn—and think it was concocted in an LA board room by
a cabal of unscrupulous movie producers looking to make a quick buck. The plot
certainly fits the criteria of a cookie cutter action flick: The semi-titular
Driver (Ryan Gosling) works as a Hollywood stuntman by day and spends his
nights moonlighting as a getaway driver for the criminally inclined. He’s a man
of few words who tends to let his fists do the talking…but only when he’s
backed into a corner. (He secretly has a heart of gold, after all.) Oh, and
this toothpick chewing, motorcycle jacket wearing loner falls in love at one
point (with his neighbor Irene, played by Carey Mulligan at her reticent best)
and in his attempts to save her from the inevitable onslaught of bad guys with
guns, blood is spilled and a lot of people die. Sound cliché yet? Even the
title, in all its lone verb glory, has the word-association effect of a cheap,
direct-to-video Transporter knock-off.
But here’s the thing: while Drive does indeed make all the right
turns of a not-quite-Jason-Statham vehicle, it’s fully aware that it’s doing
so. Every shoot-out, every car chase, every three-on-one fisticuff stunt fest
is pulled off in such genuinely cool, aesthetically pleasing ways that, by the
time the credits roll, you realize there’s not a clichéd thing about it. Drive is so much more than just a ninety
minute excuse to watch Ryan Gosling drive fast and punch people in the face:
it’s a movie about movies—about
Hollywood, about acting and actors and the roles they play and the lies they
tell, to each other and to themselves. It’s about stunts pulled and risks taken,
all just hoping for that perfect take. And it somehow manages to pull all this off
without feeling deconstructive,
parodic, or even satirical. Because ultimately, behind that rubber Hollywood
mask, Drive is just a just a really
cool film. And it knows it’s cool.
THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT YOU, BOY
Halfway through the opening chase
sequence, it becomes clear that this film has much higher stylistic ambitions
than just delivering the usual big explosions and elaborate set pieces. The
first “drive” of the movie—in which the Driver attempts to avoid police detection
while escorting the slack-jawed robbers in his back seat as far away from the
crime scene as possible—isn’t the usual Stathamian rubber-burner you might
expect: it’s quiet, cerebral, toned-down, and realistic. There’s no booming
orchestral score to tell you hey, this scene should make you feel excited. It
just is. And Ryan Gosling’s inscrutable poker face as he listens to the crackle
of the police scanner tells you so much more than a hundred-man symphony could
ever hope to do.
Later in the movie, after the
proverbial shit really hits the fan
(short story: the Driver gets double-crossed and people want him dead) we’re
treated to an even more intense car chase that, despite the escalation, still
trusts the screeching tires and roaring engines to provide a more-than-adequate
soundtrack to the vehicular action at hand. And just when you thought the lean,
stripped-down version of an action hero Ryan Gosling portrays might not measure
up to his more testosterone-fueled cinematic peers, the chick-flick heartthrob
manages to pull off some Fast and Furious-level
high speed shenanigans that would bring a tear to Vin Diesel’s eye. He’s called
“The Driver” for a reason.
But of course, car chases aren’t the
only form of action this movie offers. The fight scenes (which may actually
outnumber the driving scenes by the time the credits roll) are brutal and
immediate. The blood-red mess that Drive
becomes once the bodies start piling up provides a stark contrast the cool blue
hues the film otherwise revels in throughout. It’s a visual contrast that
literalizes the emotional dichotomy between the Driver as the sweetly smitten,
not-so-secret admirer of Irene, and the vicious killer he becomes when he’s
forced to take off the gloves. And continuing with the boxing analogy, no
punches are pulled when it comes to the film’s violence. It isn’t over-the-top,
per se, so much as it feels realistic—particularly
when compared to its laughably bloodless PG-13 contemporaries.
A REAL HUMAN BEING
The counterbalance to all this blood
and mayhem is the relationship between the Driver and his lovely neighbor
Irene. It’s a romance that gives this movie its soul. Just as the car chases
and fist fights are presented in a raw, realistic fashion, the budding
relationship between laconic-but-compassionate Ryan Gosling and
timid-but-self-reliant Carey Mulligan is portrayed in as verisimilitudic and
sincere a way as possible. That sincerity can at times be rather surprising and
unexpected, especially for audiences conditioned to expect the usual first-act
antagonism between the action star and his love interest before they inevitably
hook-up (likely amidst some well-positioned burning wreckage and a saxophone
solo). But fortunately, these subtly flirtatious scenes never devolve into a
back-and-forth series of pithy one-liners—and where you might expect an overdose
of scene-chewing repartee, you’re instead given some delightfully-awkward
silences and more than a few bashful smiles.
An even more surprising component of
the Driver and Irene’s relationship is the fact that there’s no overt sexuality
between them. I mean sure, romance by definition contains an element of
sexuality—and I’m certainly not implying that there isn’t some hidden lust
behind those bashful smiles I mentioned earlier—but none of that is made
explicit on the screen. There’s no sex scene, no hot-and-heavy make-out
session—just good ol’ fashioned hand-holding courtship. And yet it never comes
across as prudish or even as an intentional statement on sexuality. It’s just
natural to the characters.
To some extent, Irene operates as
the damsel in distress to the Driver’s knight in shining armor, but she isn’t
portrayed in as one-dimensional a way as that may sound. She’s emotionally
strong in her own way, but she’s also not one of those fake-out damsels who
secretly knows kung fu and can teach the boys a thing or two about kicking some
ass, wink wink. No, she’s a fully-realized, honest portrayal of a young mother trying
her best to raise her son and maybe find some love and happiness along the way.
And when the inevitable scene comes where the Driver saves her life, it isn’t a
moment of triumph, but of horror. She finally sees the violence he’s capable of
firsthand, and it all but crushes her pie in the sky dreams of a happily ever
after with the mysterious man next door.
YOU KEEP ME UNDER YOUR SPELL
The Driver and Benicio, Irene’s
young son, are sitting on the couch watching cartoons.
“Is he a bad guy?” the Driver asks,
presumably referring to one of the characters on the screen.
“Yeah,” Benicio replies.
“How can you tell?”
“’Cause he’s a shark.”
“There’s no good sharks?”
“No. I mean just look at him. Does
he look like a good guy to you?”
The TV remains off-camera.
This idea of we-are-who-we-are is
further driven home (no pun intended) by the Driver having a picture of a
scorpion emblazoned on the back of his trademark jacket. Apart from the violent
implications of the symbolic scorpion—with its claws and stinger and nasty
reputation—the Driver himself makes reference to the classic Tale of the
Scorpion and the Frog—in which the Scorpion, after betraying the Frog via a
swift sting to the backside, reveals he couldn’t help but sting him, because
that’s just what he does. It’s in his nature.
The Driver, of course, is the real scorpion,
the real shark of the film, in the sense that his violent nature is always
there, bubbling under the surface of his icy exterior, just waiting to be
revealed. He plays the role of the cool loner, but is secretly a violent
killer.
He’s wearing a mask.
Metaphorically, anyway. The literal mask he wears is a rubber
monstrosity molded after the face of one of the actors he works as the stunt
double for. We think nothing of it when it’s first introduced—just an
incidental prop from the set of some backlot B movie—but when he retrieves the
mask and puts in on for some third-act bloody revenge, we can’t help but
wonder, is that his real face? This
notion is all but confirmed when the masked Driver moves in for the kill on the
human cause of all his misfortune (Ron Perlman, playing a weasely, petulant,
but still somehow intimidating version of himself)—slowly walking toward him like
an arthouse Jason Voorhees in a hipster slasher flick.
NIGHTCALL
Drive is
testosterone-fueled ‘80s action boilerplate masquerading—acting—as the
high-minded, aesthetic-aware art piece of a too-cool-for-the-room auteur. Or
maybe it’s the other way around. Could the bare bones script by Hossein Amini
(based on the novel by James Sallis) have been made into an Expendables rip-off in the hands of a
lesser (or greater, depending on your tastes) director? We’ll never know, and
perhaps that’s the point. It’s all smoke and mirrors, pomp and
circumstance—carefully edited and climate controlled. It’s an expressionistic
film that shows you things the way it wants
you to see them, not as they actually are. It’s movie magic. It’s showbiz.
It’s Hollywood.
It’s a mask.
