Movie Review: DRIVE
Movie Review:
DRIVE (2011)
by Elliot Gallion
September 2011
On our way to an afternoon showing of Drive, my brother and I exchanged our typical bickers. “Well,” I said, brash with pompous certainty, “you know of course that driving is one of the most cinematic things there is. That’s why car chases are some of the most memorable parts of even the most stillborn of movies.”
“Not if you’re stuck in traffic,” he replied.
It was easy enough to shrug away his rebuttal as a byproduct of the brotherly mandate to disagreement. But after the movie, while driving home, the idea of delay struck me as accidentally prescient for the necessary discourse on Drive, a movie that—and this is no small compliment—deserves to be talked about.
Watching this movie brings with it an inherent frustration: a frustration parallel, I suppose, to that suffered by the tardy, impatient victim of red-light prejudice. To call it slow would be an insult to the epic stillness of Leone or the patient method of Melville, but Drive does languish in pseudo-contemplative silences; it relishes the tension of a prolonged beat, inviting rash presumptions of meaning and intention. A lingering close-up on Ryan Gosling’s expressionless face pockmarked by Los Angeles’ orange, pink and gray light—the lighting scheme of a parking garage—belies a paradox of knowability: the more we stare at this character, the more time he spends around others, the less likely we are to glean any substantive understanding of him. The difference between genuine red-light frustration and the artistry of Drive’s uninterrupted gaze is that while the self-deemed victim slams on his brakes convinced of the universe’s partiality to his own personal misery, Drive lends the audience a rare opportunity to sit wide-eyed in the seat belt, awe-struck by the majesty of a blinking crimson traffic light.
Here be a lobotomizingly cool piece of filmmaking: an exercise in taut, atmospheric genre revisionism with a flavor that has been called “European.” And while it is factually true that the movie’s director, Nicholas Winding-Refn, is of continental origin, the adjective “European” as it has been applied to Driverefers more to what the movie for-its-own-good lacks, rather than any specific cultural or stylistic influence. The Fast/Furious/# movies have been mentioned in a number of Drive reviews; if that series is the oil from which the critical dipstick is to be pulled, then I suppose Drive is as “European” as jet lag, and “European” is the new adjective to describe any movie that isn’t crippled by pervasive clunk, cliche, joyless inanity and a cast of chemically-rejuvenated bodies emoting through a stupor of dashed career aspirations. “Smart” seems more appropriate in this instance.
Drive is a car movie the way Riffifi is a heist movie. I use Riffifi as an example because of its odd pedigree: an American genre movie directed in a European manner by a blacklisted American. The tradition of European filmmakers taking on American genres is a long and bountiful one, and while Drive is not worthy of off-hand inclusion in a sentence with the likes of Breathless or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, it approaches its story in a way similar to those ostensibly highbrow treatments of ostensibly lowbrow pulp. The genre becomes a vehicle (pun!) for cinematic playtime with imagery and mood. A scenario about a contract driver with stalwart standards for the transportation of lower-tier criminals who falls in love with his neighbor and is subsequently drawn into a mafia turf war is not especially compelling (nor is it “European”). Most of the plot comes on suddenly in a few exposition-heavy scenes near the movie’s end, one of its obvious flaws. But the application of oblique “pop” music and throbbing bass tones transforms/subsumes the generic expositional blah into a slick, violent opera.
Unlike in its “car movie” contemporaries, the sensations of Drive are palpable; its deaths, meaningful; its interpersonal entanglements, compelling. The most memorable scene in Drive takes place in an elevator. Had it appeared in a squeaky-clean studio-produced sequel called Fast and Furious: Kickin’ It Into Sixth Gear, the image and accompanying sound of Christina Hendricks’ head exploding from a shotgun’s slow-motion whisper may have engendered giddy squeals from an audience of preteen virgin boys. In Drive, it is appropriately horrific (unless you aren’t a Christina Hendricks fan).
A review of DRIVE, directed by Nicholas Winding-Refn.
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