Ratings
THE DAILY: 4 of 5 Stars
ROTTEN TOMATOES: 93%
“Drive,” from Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, is an almost comically terse, minimal film. It’s made from a slim 80-page script with a one-sentence plot and stars Ryan Gosling as a getaway driver so mute he communicates mostly in a variety of smiles, from a perplexed, edge-of-the-mouth uptick to the I-want-to-marry-you-and-take-care-of-your-son-for-the-rest-of-our-natural-lives full-headlights special.
That Refn has made a stylish, bloody genre film in the implacable mode of Walter Hill’s “The Driver” or “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” starring the heartthrob from “The Notebook” is just one of many self-aware jokes on offer here. “Drive” is an immensely likeable movie, and a very good one, too, deriving its gravity and charm as much from the crime conventions it pays homage to as from those it slyly mocks.
Gosling’s nameless lead is a loner who toils at a repair shop by day, freelances as a Hollywood stunt driver, and works nights as a wheelman for criminals, offering his services in high stakes five-minute windows. The movie’s opening gambit, as good a piece of filmmaking as you will see anywhere, shows Gosling helping a couple of thieves evade capture in an elaborate choreography coordinated by a watch and two radios — one monitoring a police frequency, the other tuned to a nearby Clippers game. It’s a chase with very little chasing, an escape that relies more heavily on the brake than on the accelerator, and it sets the tone for the rest of Refn’s movie, which lets most of its action unfold in real time, rather than in the usual mania of loud noises and jump cuts. The details are unhurried and everything is audible, from the creaky flex of Gosling’s leather driving gloves to the ominously insistent pinging of an open car door.
Gosling is not much prone to talking, or to friendship, but you get the sense he’s a criminal in lieu of having anything else to do when the sun sets. He’s a solitary man, but maybe not entirely by choice; when he meets a neighbor and her young son in his apartment building (Carey Mulligan, soon to set a million delicate hearts aflame), his life almost immediately reorients itself around her. Refn has said in interviews that the films of John Hughes were a major inspiration for “Drive,” and you can see them at work here in the lush soundtrack and innocent, tender courtship between Gosling and Mulligan as they drive around Los Angeles, quietly holding hands.
But he’s too weird and sociopathic for love, perhaps, and she has a husband in jail, who comes home still in debt to two local gangsters (played to entertaining and scary effect by ’80s cinema refugees Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman). Brooks’ crime boss is himself a former movie producer — “Action films, sexy stuff” he says in the movie’s most self-satirical line. “One critic called them European.” But “Drive’s” bloody second half is as American as anything Refn has ever made, as Gosling breaks his own code to aid Mulligan’s husband in one last job, which predictably goes very, very wrong (if you’ve ever wanted to see Christina Hendricks decapitated by a shotgun, this is surely the movie for you), leaving him with a suitcase full of cash and a legion of powerful enemies.
Refn has also compared “Drive” to a fairy tale, and at times it feels like one. Gosling’s character is simultaneously exceedingly competent and completely unworldly, with an effaced backstory and only a rudimentary grasp of how other people operate. “You’re not very good at this, are you?” says Perlman’s Nino to Gosling, and he’s not. But the flip side of his innocence is an astonishing capacity for violence, dramatized in an elevator scene too good to ruin here, but which is both the emotional and structural centerpiece of the movie, as Gosling demonstrates both of his character’s extremes in a matter of a seconds.
Refn’s penchant for startlingly graphic violence is in some ways all that separates this intensely stylish film (shot in saturated black and blue — and pink! — by the cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, who also did “The Usual Suspects” and “Three Kings”) from the much lighter fare of a director like Sofia Coppola. Or at least, the two auteurs are both prone to slow motion, on-the-nose pop music (College’s “A Real Hero,” soon to be playing on a loop inside your mind) and unspoken, borderline-platonic romances. But “Drive” also has a plot, unlike most of Coppola’s films, and it’s the pull between the archetypal series of escalating confrontations that Gosling must survive and the sad romance at the script’s heart that gives the movie so much of its uncommon power.
Clad in an ever-bloodier silver jacket with a scorpion emblazoned on the back, Gosling staggers through an uncharacteristically idyllic urban landscape, with even the notoriously concrete Los Angeles River repurposed as a place of discovery and wonder. The town has rarely looked more innocent or more promising; even as the blood begins to splatter, there is a sense of Gosling protecting something pure against the incursions of the real life Los Angeles most of us know, rife with corruption, greed and conspiracy.
But “Drive” isn’t exactly wide-eyed. “My hands are a little dirty,” an on-the-job Gosling tells Brooks, when the two men first meet at the repair shop run by his mentor (a hobbled Bryan Cranston, in an effective, understated turn). “So are mine,” says Brooks, grinning. The two men are more alike than Gosling would like to admit, at least at first. But when he finally does, look out. No one is more brutal, Refn suggests, than a man with love in his heart.
THE DAILY: 4 of 5 Stars
ROTTEN TOMATOES: 93%
“Drive,” from Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, is an almost comically terse, minimal film. It’s made from a slim 80-page script with a one-sentence plot and stars Ryan Gosling as a getaway driver so mute he communicates mostly in a variety of smiles, from a perplexed, edge-of-the-mouth uptick to the I-want-to-marry-you-and-take-care-of-your-son-for-the-rest-of-our-natural-lives full-headlights special.
That Refn has made a stylish, bloody genre film in the implacable mode of Walter Hill’s “The Driver” or “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” starring the heartthrob from “The Notebook” is just one of many self-aware jokes on offer here. “Drive” is an immensely likeable movie, and a very good one, too, deriving its gravity and charm as much from the crime conventions it pays homage to as from those it slyly mocks.
Gosling’s nameless lead is a loner who toils at a repair shop by day, freelances as a Hollywood stunt driver, and works nights as a wheelman for criminals, offering his services in high stakes five-minute windows. The movie’s opening gambit, as good a piece of filmmaking as you will see anywhere, shows Gosling helping a couple of thieves evade capture in an elaborate choreography coordinated by a watch and two radios — one monitoring a police frequency, the other tuned to a nearby Clippers game. It’s a chase with very little chasing, an escape that relies more heavily on the brake than on the accelerator, and it sets the tone for the rest of Refn’s movie, which lets most of its action unfold in real time, rather than in the usual mania of loud noises and jump cuts. The details are unhurried and everything is audible, from the creaky flex of Gosling’s leather driving gloves to the ominously insistent pinging of an open car door.
Gosling is not much prone to talking, or to friendship, but you get the sense he’s a criminal in lieu of having anything else to do when the sun sets. He’s a solitary man, but maybe not entirely by choice; when he meets a neighbor and her young son in his apartment building (Carey Mulligan, soon to set a million delicate hearts aflame), his life almost immediately reorients itself around her. Refn has said in interviews that the films of John Hughes were a major inspiration for “Drive,” and you can see them at work here in the lush soundtrack and innocent, tender courtship between Gosling and Mulligan as they drive around Los Angeles, quietly holding hands.
But he’s too weird and sociopathic for love, perhaps, and she has a husband in jail, who comes home still in debt to two local gangsters (played to entertaining and scary effect by ’80s cinema refugees Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman). Brooks’ crime boss is himself a former movie producer — “Action films, sexy stuff” he says in the movie’s most self-satirical line. “One critic called them European.” But “Drive’s” bloody second half is as American as anything Refn has ever made, as Gosling breaks his own code to aid Mulligan’s husband in one last job, which predictably goes very, very wrong (if you’ve ever wanted to see Christina Hendricks decapitated by a shotgun, this is surely the movie for you), leaving him with a suitcase full of cash and a legion of powerful enemies.
Refn has also compared “Drive” to a fairy tale, and at times it feels like one. Gosling’s character is simultaneously exceedingly competent and completely unworldly, with an effaced backstory and only a rudimentary grasp of how other people operate. “You’re not very good at this, are you?” says Perlman’s Nino to Gosling, and he’s not. But the flip side of his innocence is an astonishing capacity for violence, dramatized in an elevator scene too good to ruin here, but which is both the emotional and structural centerpiece of the movie, as Gosling demonstrates both of his character’s extremes in a matter of a seconds.
Refn’s penchant for startlingly graphic violence is in some ways all that separates this intensely stylish film (shot in saturated black and blue — and pink! — by the cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, who also did “The Usual Suspects” and “Three Kings”) from the much lighter fare of a director like Sofia Coppola. Or at least, the two auteurs are both prone to slow motion, on-the-nose pop music (College’s “A Real Hero,” soon to be playing on a loop inside your mind) and unspoken, borderline-platonic romances. But “Drive” also has a plot, unlike most of Coppola’s films, and it’s the pull between the archetypal series of escalating confrontations that Gosling must survive and the sad romance at the script’s heart that gives the movie so much of its uncommon power.
Clad in an ever-bloodier silver jacket with a scorpion emblazoned on the back, Gosling staggers through an uncharacteristically idyllic urban landscape, with even the notoriously concrete Los Angeles River repurposed as a place of discovery and wonder. The town has rarely looked more innocent or more promising; even as the blood begins to splatter, there is a sense of Gosling protecting something pure against the incursions of the real life Los Angeles most of us know, rife with corruption, greed and conspiracy.
But “Drive” isn’t exactly wide-eyed. “My hands are a little dirty,” an on-the-job Gosling tells Brooks, when the two men first meet at the repair shop run by his mentor (a hobbled Bryan Cranston, in an effective, understated turn). “So are mine,” says Brooks, grinning. The two men are more alike than Gosling would like to admit, at least at first. But when he finally does, look out. No one is more brutal, Refn suggests, than a man with love in his heart.
