New Releases: 'Drive'

Drive
100 minutes, R, USA
Release Date   September 16, 2011
Distributor   FilmDistrict
Director   Nicolas Winding Refn
Written by   Hossein Amini, based on the book by James Sallis
Producers   David Lancaster, Bill Lischak, Michel Litvak, Linda McDonough, John Palermo, Marc Platt, Gigi Pritzker, Adam Siegel, Jeffrey Stott, Gary Michael Walters
Music   Cliff Martinez
Cinematography   Newton Thomas Sigel
Editing   Mat Newman
Production Design   Beth Mickle
Art Direction   Christopher Tandon

Cast   Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Oscar Isaac, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, Kaden Leos, Jeff Wolfe, James Biberi, Russ Tamblyn, Joey Bucaro, Tiara Parker

In his recent appraisal of the Dardenne Brothers’ The Kid with a Bike, Jonathan Rosenbaum laments what he sees as “the most detestable [single trend] in contemporary commercial filmmaking...: exploitation movies that go out into the world as ‘serious’ art movies.” As an example of the moral hypocrisy, the underhanded audience-pandering, that would have extreme violence standing in for sensitivity and seriousness and depth, Rosenbaum cites Drive as an example. He’s right—Drive is the most extreme example in recent (or even distant) memory of a movie that so badly wants to have it both ways. It wants to eat its cake and have it too, to use an outworn aphorism; or more accurately, it wants to shove some nasty dessert in our faces, smearing it roughly into the mouths/eyes of audiences distanced by irony and detachment, but the movie also wants to pretend to gently offer us such desserts on a gleaming silver platter. Is it a disgusting badass exploitation flick or a sensitive existential character study? The movie doesn’t know, and it doesn’t ask or expect us to decide. Some critics have graciously labeled the movie “ambiguous,” but that seems like an overreaching way to say that the movie can’t decide what it wants to be (thematically, conceptually) because it has nothing on its mind. This leaves us with a movie that is unquestionably well-made—it builds and maintains an astonishing level of dread and stoic misery with impressive formal exactness—but insultingly fake about its own pretensions. 

The director, Nicolas Winding Refn (who’s made some fascinating movies before, especially 2008’s Bronson), has offered an excuse for Drive’s bipolar nature in interviews: he is interested, he says, in the duality of macho action heroes, whose (typically) rigid black-and-white moral decisions mask an unsettling aggression and a penchant for snapping into brutal violence instantaneously. If he’s trying to deconstruct action movies’ typical characterization of their protagonists, he’s in some good company: this duality has also been on the mind of directors such as Robert Aldrich, Sam Peckinpah, Kathryn Bigelow, and David Cronenberg (whose A History of Violence may be the textbook example of this kind of morally-shaded deconstruction). Those directors, to varying degrees, all tackle the emotional drives, the external circumstances, and/or the latent psychological neuroses that lead their action heroes to commit acts that could be reasonably deemed either selflessly heroic or viciously bloodthirsty. Movies like Kiss Me Deadly, Straw Dogs, Point Break, or A History of Violence don’t attempt to tidily explain their characters’ proclivity to violence, but they do at least try to explore it, to place the characters in such a world and to convey their actions in such a way that might suggest why they’re so willing to do such awful things.

What seems self-defeating about Drive is that Refn is operating on a different wavelength here: this movie’s style is more reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Melville than of, say, Peckinpah. Melville’s cool, distanced observations of professional lawmen and criminals at odds seemed so stripped-down that they avoided fleshing out their characters at all. Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge, for example, primarily seemed to observe their stoic characters going through the motions, filling their preordained roles of policeman or thief almost obligatorily, seeming to know that they were already caught up in a web of fate that would kill them in the end. It doesn’t seem off-base to call such films existential because the characters are defined almost exclusively by their actions; like Meursault in Albert Camus' novel The Stranger, Melville’s characters often seem resigned to the fact that they have no free will, that a series of causes and effects have led them to carry out their actions, and that emotional or psychological reactions to the world around them would not in any way influence their behavior. Camus’ writing in The Stranger is deceptively simple: he does not psychologize or appraise his main character, but at the same time there are a wealth of interpretations that the reader may reflect back on to Meursault. (Why does he kill the nameless Arab? Camus’ unwillingness to even ponder this question forces us to question why we do anything in our lives, just as Melville’s films sometimes seem like tauntingly cryptic observations of human specimens trapped in a cage.)     

Drive, apparently, is meant to be a similarly existentialist observation of a character switching robotically back and forth between sensitive self-sacrifice and god-awful brutality. The Driver (Ryan Gosling), as he’s known, spends his time working in a garage and performing stunts for Hollywood action movies. By night, he hires himself out as a professional driver for thieves, hitmen, disreputable businessmen, whoever—his only stipulation is that he’s given a five-minute window to pick up the loot or the henchmen, anything beyond that window is not his responsibility. He doesn’t know what to do when he’s not driving; early in the movie, he returns home for less than a minute, dejectedly looks around his apartment, and immediately leaves again, aimlessly driving around Los Angeles. This robotic state of being—just keep moving until the ride is over—is meant to be a stripped-down representation of human existence. Melville's influence is all over the beginning of this movie, especially in a meticulously-planned opening heist that reveals the one and only pleasure the Driver feels in his life: knowing that he’s good at what he does.

But the Driver’s clocklike existence is impeded, burst apart, by a random meeting with a next-door neighbor, adorable Irene (Carey Mulligan). She has a young son named Benicio, whose father is in prison for undisclosed (but easily-guessed) reasons. The Driver and Irene almost involuntarily become attracted to each other—they fall into the other’s company, they smile and flirt awkwardly, tenuously. Gosling and Mulligan are so good that we believe in their mutual attraction; each fleeting glimpse and touch suggests characters who don’t want to feel anything for each other (she’s still married, after all; he lives his life based on a principle of austere isolation) but do so anyway, against their will.

A week later, Irene’s husband, Standard, is released from prison. We think we know where the movie’s going here—a tense confrontation in a hallway makes it apparent that Standard distrusts the friendship between his wife and the Driver—but there are no altercations between the two, and only the slightest antagonism. In fact, after Standard is mercilessly beaten by a couple thugs in a parking garage, the Driver hesitatingly, and foolishly, offers assistance to Standard. In order for Irene and Benicio to remain safe, Standard must pull off (wait for it…) One Last Heist, for which the Driver will act as accomplice. We know the heist will go horribly awry, but when it does it still catches us off guard: Drive takes its time getting to its lower depths, spending nearly an hour with drawn-out, quiet scenes of mounting dread before the bodies start piling up. And after such a long stretch of quiet intensity, the blood splatters—a head, literally, explodes—and the movie smacks us awake with its aggressive contradictions. Sensitivity and slaughter—all, apparently, in the name of jerking around the audience.

The movie is so well-made that I wanted to believe it had more to say, that there was a reason for its attention-grabbing nastiness. But the Best Director prize that Refn won at the Cannes Film Festival (where audiences reportedly stood up and cheered at the exploding-head scene) was, all evidence indicates, a reward for a well-brought-off prank, essentially congratulating the director on making artifice look substantial. I’m willing to admit that the exploding-head scene is incredibly powerful—it does viscerally reflect the movie’s conflicting states of mind, and allows the slowly mounting tension to erupt, with disgusting liquescence, at just the right time—but things get worse from there (in terms of gore as well as in terms of phoniness). 

The epitome (or the nadir, depending on how you look at it) of this “sensitively violent” hypocrisy comes in a scene set in an elevator: the Driver and Irene share a long, slow ride to the ground floor, with the Driver trying to make amends to her for hiding the truth about his partnership with her husband. (I’m not kidding when I say that, after Irene slaps him in the previous scene, the Driver sheds a single, lugubrious tear.) An admittedly gorgeous slow-motion shot—set to an opulent techno-synth love song, with the fluorescent lights of the elevator flickering grandly—has the Driver sweeping Irene to the corner of the elevator and kissing her passionately (here we have a relief of the prolonged sexual tension that mirrors the aforementioned relief of the film’s mounting threat of violence; both moments are technically faultless). But there’s another man in the elevator with them—a villainous hitman, which the Driver detects when he spots a handgun bulging from the man’s jacket. (Why would Irene and the Driver passionately make out in an elevator next to a total stranger? Because it would make a good scene…that’s all that really matters here.) The elevator reaches the bottom floor and violence erupts: the Driver pushes Irene out of the opening door; he proceeds to kill the bodyguard in outrageously violent fashion, essentially crushing his skull by stomping on it incessantly. (Refn reportedly asked Gaspar Noé for advice on how to make the head-stomping scene more visceral and disturbing. You know you’re heading in the wrong direction when you’re asking him for filmmaking advice.) Though the scene was shortened so that the film could receive an R rating, we’re still not spared grisly images revealing the full extent of the victim’s mutilation. Irene backs out of the elevator in horror, as the Driver gapes back at her, wordlessly, bloodstained. We’re sickened…but isn’t it all in the name of love?

How susceptible does Refn think the audience is? I understand that that’s precisely what he’s trying to challenge—our willingness to believe that action movie heroes behave virtuously and rightly, despite the violence they perpetrate—but by pairing his characters’ emotions and their violent atrocities so intimately, he makes them both seem ridiculous. The gore, the brutality, seem like little more than ploys in order to make us sit up and pay attention because they serve the fatuous notion that the Driver is committing them out of love, out of selflessness. Concurrently, the tenderness he feels towards Irene and Benicio just seems like a pose to inject some humanism into an aggressively heartless affair. Cynicism and artifice posing as compassion is the worst kind of anti-humanism imaginable.

How are we supposed to feel about the Driver? It would be fine, maybe even commendable, if the movie didn’t ultimately try to answer that question, instead forcing us to decide. But Drive does ultimately provide an answer for us. Refn goes to great lengths to convey the Driver’s rugged emotionalism, his man-of-few-words vulnerability; he may crush skulls with his feet and force a bullet down a man’s throat with the claw of a hammer, but really he’s just misunderstood and lonely. Swooping slow-motion shots of Irene and the Driver walking down hallways, set to melancholy yet romantic music, as Irene quietly takes in Gosling’s chiseled profile reveal just how enamored we’re supposed to be of his gruff manliness. And even though he’s (at times) maniacally violent, he’s better than the movie’s real villains—a loudmouthed gangster (Ron Perlman) who sets the plot in motion by sending his goons to beat the shit out of Standard; a conniving businessman (Albert Brooks) who emotionlessly stabs a man in the eye with a fork, then repeatedly plunges a butcher’s knife into his throat. The final showdown, in fact, is between one of these villains and the Driver, and when the latter character seems to prevail, driving off into the sunset while undergoing extreme blood loss, there’s no question that we’re supposed to take satisfaction in his victory. (This final showdown is filmed almost entirely in shadow, with sharp objects sticking out of bodies in silhouette—an approach that you might think would be preferable, since it doesn’t indulge in hollowly shocking violence, but which may be just as off-putting by acting infinitely more serious than anything in this movie deserves.) There’s no moral ambiguity here; there are heroes and villains like always, it’s just that the former act more violently than they usually do (or, at least, that violence is shown to us more unflinchingly). 

The majority of critics have been duped by Drive’s sleek style, by its initial patience and its quietness, by sensitive performances in the service of paper-thin characters. Make no mistake, to the extent that Drive works beyond its style, it’s almost entirely because of the cast. Gosling is fascinating to watch whether he’s in sad-eyed sensitive mode or psychotic bloodlust mode—the contradiction inherent in his character would seem much more juvenile in another actor’s bloodied hands. Mulligan is miscast but we can’t help but care for her, and their chemistry is remarkable. In supporting roles, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, and Ron Perlman may not make their characters seem like actual human beings (Cranston fares best of all), but at least they make them charismatic and interesting to watch. Like practically everything in Drive, the performances are technically proficient and well-honed, but they disguise an underlying attitude towards the world (and the audience) that is seriously deluded, hypocritical, and condescending.

Why condescending? Because the movie assumes we’ll take its aesthetic at face value: that open ending, those artsy compositions and lighting, the meticulousness of the framing, they all must mean that the movie is serious and deep and extraordinary. But it gives us nothing beyond its style to merit such faux-profundity. Nobody in the movie is deep or interesting enough to warrant Drive’s self-seriousness. The film’s makers assume that audiences today are so cynical and ironic and detached from actual emotion that we’ll take a semblance of emotion for the real thing—in other words, that caring about characters (or, by extension, about human beings) is now just a matter of images and surface appearances, that all it takes is good cinematography to convince us of the movie’s sincerity. More than any Quentin Tarantino movie, Drive antes up the violence and the grittiness of earlier exploitation movies and asks us to believe that they stand for innovation and intelligence. There’s more sincerity in any one scene of Jackie Brown than in all of Drive.