Dir. Nicolas Winding Refn , USA , 100mins, 2011
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, Albert Brooks
Review by Matthew Rodgers
Recipient of the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it takes only a minute of the opening credit sequence’s synth orchestrated, LA concrete jungle vista for you to realise why. Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn has engineered a unique beast that gets under your skin in a way that so few movies do and keeps you in its beautifully translucent grip from start to oh so brutal finish. It feels hackneyed to apply this comparison, but Drive is this generation’s Taxi Driver , it’s that good.
Ostensibly this is a love story, which involves an introvert movie stunt driver (Ryan Gosling), who moonlights as a freelance criminal getaway driver, and his similarly shy, single-mother neighbour (Carey Mulligan). The requisite spanner in the works is her soon to be released husband (Oscar Isaac) and the prison protection money that he now owes the local Kingpins (Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks). Torn between his unattainable love and an inherent inclination to do good, our scorpion adorned, silver jacket wearing driver decides that he’ll help the family and suffer the domino effect consequences.
Everything about Drive is so effortlessly cool that you can’t help but be transfixed by its hypnotic stylistics; the eighties invoking pink felt-tip screen text and a soundtrack that is so perfectly married to the visuals that it becomes an essential part of the storytelling, in particular the way in which Chromatics “ Tick of the Clock ” conducts the Grand Theft Auto style getaway sequences, which adds so much to the tension and momentum of those moments.
Justifying the plaudits, Refn’s camera work is wonderfully fluent with none of the fast edits you’d associate with the automotive genre, but here gliding to the aforementioned soundtrack. We spend much of the drive time looking over Gosling’s shoulder as he manoeuvres the car beneath bridges or reverses into dimly lit alleys, the focus never shifting from his ice cool exterior, always aware that this is about the man and not the car. Anyone expecting Gone in 60 Seconds will be severely disappointed but ultimately educated by this ninety minute master-class.
Looking beneath the bodywork may reveal subtexts of disenfranchised American males in a climate of overseas wars and few opportunities; but we are never given much of a background check on Gosling’s brooding wheelman and as such take him on face value. But that’s enough.
His is an understated powerhouse performance of very few lines that leaves an incredible, indelible impact. Chewing on a tooth pick in the manner of the Hollywood greats, Gosling has an aura about him that draws and demands your attention, despite the genius of what’s going on around him.
Sharing the screen with the excellent Carey Mulligan, with whom a series of exchanged looks and simple gestures carry more oomph than the assorted engines, the chemistry is palpable. The ever-dependable Bryan Cranston also scores points. It is not to their detriment that Gosling dominates them all with his sullen turn.
Pure art as big screen entertainment very rarely works as well as this, and despite the wheels threatening to come off during the final act, and some very extreme violence, it remains a haunting, cerebral masterpiece that takes its place at the front of the grid for Film of 2011.
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[...] Drive (18) | Close-Up Film Review Review by Matthew Rodgers. Recipient of the Best Director award at this year's Cannes Film Festival, it takes only a minute of the opening credit sequence's synth orchestrated, LA concrete jungle vista for you to realise why. Danish filmmaker [...]