“You give me a time and a place, and I give you a window,” explains the Driver (Ryan Gosling), otherwise unnamed. “Anything happens in that five minutes and I’m yours no matter what. Anything a minute either side of that and you’re on your own.”
In light of those rules, Drive begins with the pick-up of two almost-late robbers, whom the Driver deftly conveys to the anonymity of L.A.’s Staples Centre while evading pursuing cops in cars and – for good measure – a helicopter.
|
Drive Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. |
Taciturn and stoic, but with the half-buried altruism of a man who sees what needs to be done and then simply does it, he could be a James Dean impersonator channelling Clint Eastwood.
So it is easy to see why his neighbour, the similarly taciturn but beguiling Irene (Carey Mulligan), raising a son whose father is in prison, might find her clean-cut floor-mate platonically alluring in a flat filled with lowlifes.
It is less obvious why the Driver reciprocates Irene’s interest, since he keeps busy complementing his nocturnal getaway driving as a stunt driver and mechanic, both under garage owner Shannon (Bryan Cranston), by day, and says he likes to keep things uncomplicated.
But attraction (one would be hard-pressed to say there is any ‘love’ in this story) tends to complicate things.
Sure enough, even as Shannon lines up more work for his protegé – stock car racing made possible by the investments of a couple of shady businessmen, Bernie (Albert Brooks) and Nino (Ron Perlman) – Irene’s husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) is released and returns home but with a large, indistinct debt to some unsavoury jailhouse creditors.
In short, Standard needs the kind of thing that needs a getaway driver, and right there next door is the Driver, who’s been helping out a bit while he was away, and as the poster says (borrowing from No Country for Old Men), “there are no clean getaways.”
With Gosling fresh off playing a hunky heartbreaker in Crazy, Stupid Love, the very limited range of the Driver character nonetheless allows him to extend himself in new directions as an actor.
But with a few exceptions – Christina Hendricks as a heist accomplice, Oscar Isaac as the father bent on redemption, and to a lesser extent Carey Mulligan – the rest of the cast seems content to play shades of themselves, doing what they are accustomed to doing, with Bryan Cranson in particular reverting to type after a welcome change of pace in Contagion.
Director Nicholas Winding Refn seems more concerned with mood, with laboriously patient tableaux punctuated by eruptions of bloodletting, with the slickness of urban night-driving scenes matched by electronic music, and with turning an ugly quilted baseball jacket the Driver sports for most of the film into some sort of successor to the red windbreaker from Rebel Without A Cause.
And that is Drive’s biggest failing: for all its immaculate lighting and resplendent cinematography, its utmost restraint for the first act, the veneer gives way to shameless gratuity as the plot unravels into a stock revenge fantasy as well-worn as it is well-executed.
For a movie that wants to grip and shock you with bursts of gunfire and knifeplay, Drive includes too many instances of violence (or its vivid red aftermath) played for laughs.
Can a movie with a bad guy who keeps his favourite murder-knives in what looks like a gilded humidor really be taken seriously?
For crafting something so concertedly distinct from the rest of the contemporary action/heist flock, Refn deserves his kudos; but even a welcome change can be contradictory in some ways and overfamiliar in others.
The equation of slow-motion with stylization tires quickly, especially when it is the sort of slo-mo that seems to predate the last two Lars von Trier films and the abundance of trendy million-frames-per-second videos on YouTube.
The driving and chase scenes are in spots curiously sterile, with no sense of physicality or momentum – for a movie all about driving, it feels an awful lot like a commercial for excellent soundproofing and suspension.
Packed full of references, sporting pink brush-script title cards and intermittent 80s-style synth-pop music, Drive might be an indie film on training wheels, but its deliberateness and general understatement – which cast the film as an almost Kubrickian revision of Jason Statham’s brainless, happily mainstream Transporter franchise – make it a perfect starting place for moviegoers who want to dip their toes in the shallow end.