A stunt driver (Ryan Gosling) earns cash on the side as a getaway driver, but is drawn closer in to organised crime through his infatuation with his neighbour (Carey Mulligan).
This movie is the coolest and most stylish I’ve seen. There’s a lot of driving, a lot of swagger, a lot of violence, a lot of awesome music. It’s a Jason Statham style thriller with a distinctly art house flavour, and despite the lengthy pauses between lines of dialogue, the film still manages to be sensory overload. I’ve had images and music from this movie stuck in my head for days now, to the extent that I’ve resorted to listening to the soundtrack on YouTube and watching the poorly edited trailer repeatedly (I won’t link to it because it spoils far too much of the movie). Films rarely have this kind of effect on me; in fact, it’s the opposite, usually I have to struggle to remember what I thought of a film when writing a review. The DVD doesn’t come out until the 30th January (it would have otherwise made an ideal Christmas present), so I’ll have to wait until then for my obsessive repeat viewings.
Ryan Gosling is a revelation. I’d seen him in Lars and the Real Girl (wow that is an embarrassingly poorly written review) and Ides of March, but in Drive he takes on the smart and tough guy archetype and plays it to perfection. He’s so good at selling a character by the simple things he does, walking, breathing, looking, that he almost doesn’t need the dialogue, which is good as he has very little of it here. He also hand-picked the director, Nicolas Winding Refn, a very smart choice. I’m in the Ryan Gosling fan club from now on. Plus he’s totally dreamy.
The rest of the casting of this film is off the wall inspired. Albert Brooks, recently the voices of the villain in The Simpsons Movie and Marlin in Finding Nemo, is brutal and intimidating as a violent gangster. Carey Mulligan is the perfect love interest motivation. Just by looking at her innocent face you can understand why the driver would fall for her. Christina Hendricks is great in a role that lasts about 10 minutes with very few lines. Ron Perlman is the best I’ve ever seen him (well, he was pretty good as Hellboy). This role more than undoes the misery that was Mutant Chronicles (another poorly written review, but I think you get the point that it was awful). On paper these choices all elicit a huge WTF? In the film, they work perfectly.
The music is amazing and I will definitely buy the soundtrack on CD so I can cruise around feeling like a badass. I’ve seen some criticism of the music choices, but these people don’t know what they’re talking about. I don’t normally insult other people for their opinions (I’ll let you decide if that’s sarcasm), but you can’t dislike this soundtrack unless you hate being alive. Similarly, if you ever say a movie is “too violent” you just don’t get it. A movie can have gratuitous violence, that is, violence that is unnecessary for the plot to work, but there is no arbitrary standard of permitted amount of violence to which you must hold every film.
I’m strongly tempted to call this quintessential. It’s certainly quintessential for 2011, but I don’t know how it’ll hold up on repeated viewings for years to come. For now though, it’s the best film I’ve seen released this year.
Verdict: Strong recommend.
I’ll agree with everything on this review, it was very stylish, very well made. About 30 minutes in I felt the strong need to criticise what I felt to be a lacking in dialogue and character development, but the way in which the film took off after that point really changed my mind.
I wonder if the weight on Gosling’s scene presence was a bit too heavy handed though? What would your opinion be?
I could watch Gosling do pretty much anything to be honest. I think the lack of dialogue is the character development. LA is such a sprawling, seedy, anonymous place that those who survive (and the characters are very much survivors) do so by keeping their mouth shut. It’s only when the Driver breaks his rules and gets involved that things go wrong for him.
I also read somewhere that Gosling’s character has strong autism, which is why he understands cars so well but not people (which would also explain why he doesn’t talk much, why he’s so good with kids, and why he doesn’t ever get with Irene).
And like I said afterwards, I think you need that contrast between the slow and the suddenly, explosively violent (the second time I saw it in cinemas, I jumped at the first gun shot). The first half’s a love story, the second half is a revenge story. Also there’s no way you could write dialogue to go over that soundtrack.
Drive is the kind of film that I have such an irrational love for that I can turn any potential flaw into a positive. It’s also the kind of film I can watch over and over again. The director, Nicolas Winding Refn, is colour blind, which explains the use of strong, primary colours in the film. He also doesn’t have a driver’s license; he failed his test 8 times (that’s more than Liam!), so it’s really interesting that he chose this movie.
Thanks for the comment!