DRIVE (film analysis)

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.