After hearing so many people suck the dick of Drive for about year, I finally decided to hunker down and watch it. The main thing that put me off for so long was the inclusion of Ryan Gosling, an actor who's fame and fan adoration still eludes my sense of sanity. All he has to do is be in a movie, standing around looking tough or sad, and suddenly he is god's floral embellished gift to earth. Situations like this crop up every once in a while in pop culture which really make me wonder about the populace, and, if I'm an unwitting monster or alien or in a bad coma dream that I can't wake up from. I don't know how else to fathom so many people genuinely loving mediocre presence. Or worse, fooling themselves into loving it, because there he is right now and he looks cool and he's serious and that jacket he wears makes the movie.
On the other hand, Drive is directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, who made Bronson (an interesting biopic that starred Tom Hardy), and it includes actors of mild respectability like Bryan Cranston, Ron Pearlman and Albert Brooks. However, the second red flag (after Gosla-thon) shot up as I learned the synopsis. The story of a nameless, brooding stunt driver falling for his neighbor and getting tangled up in a local mob deal, is definitively simplistic. It's a premise where the dialogue, the characters and the pacing need to be incredibly strong in order to pull off something truly memorable. The trouble with a lot of these hyper-genre movies that call transparent attention to the types of films they are referencing, is that they often only echo the shallowest aspects of those previous films. It's as if the idea of making a good movie is thrown out in favor of people can getting their nostalgia on.
It's not to say Drive is overtly one of these hyper-genre films, it is less so than movies like Machete, Hobo with a Shot Gun, Faster, The Expendables, Not Another Teen Movie, Epic Movie, etc, but there is a specter of hard-lit, gratuitous '80s violence running throughout. Not to mention the sleazy neon synths of the pop songs that drop in now and again.
I'll admit that the beginning of Drive has hints of promise in it. Gosling isn't talking much (what he does best), his moonlight getaway is set up amidst a flashy montage and punctuated synth bass notes, the world is encased in a dreamy green-white cinematography. But even then, I could spot holes that would be torn wider and wider as the film progressed. Save for a few specific scenes, the movie is edited like any other big budget Hollywood film, with all the unnecessary jump cuts, spoon-fed character/location references and awkward leaps in time that you can chew on.
After a while, Drive starts folding in on itself, one plotline and turn-of-dialogue at a time. Whether it's the short-lived ring of the cautionary words that Albert Brooks' homicidal mob boss, Bernie Rose, gives to Gosling (mob involvement = lifetime of danger), or the anti-climatic twist/swift resolution of the driver taking revenge over a rigged pawnshop robbery, it's easy to tell that any possible narrative establishment or long-form tension has been sucked away. The "smile our way into love" interaction between Gosling and Carrie Mulligan's Irene is another example of this, the two characters literally smiling sheepishly at each other - when they meet, when the driver plays with Irene's kid, when they see each other in the hall, when Irene's husband comes home - all the way into a hyperbolic make-out scene that absolutely was supposed to be super cool and stylish, but comes off overblown and irrelevant, because who really gives a shit about this cardboard cutout of a relationship?
The movie also has a major non-sequitur that seems to hint at either extra footage being cut or the ritualistic force-fuck of an attempted cool-kid moment that was completely unnecessary. The driver retrieves a human face mold from the set he works on, implying that he is to wear it in some functional situation where he does not want to be recognized. Right? Wrong. He dons the mask in front of an Italian restaurant owned by one of the mob bosses where no one sees him, and, instead of going and pulling some trick to reach the boss, the driver waits for him to come out, then follows him faraway to his lonely demise. So, the only explanation for this man-mask is that the director wanted to drum up the idiosyncratic-scene quotient.
Even Drive's depiction of violence is nothing to guffaw at, despite the "blown-away" reaction that I've heard from so many people. The few moments of ultra-gore, like the shotgun blast to the head and the kitchen knife to the throat, are satisfying to watch for the virtue of their technical execution, but not for punctuation on the context of the story. These moments of violence come off as useless fantasy rather than weighted action, which actually hollows out the film more than it lifts it up. On top of everything, each sequence of blood and guts is edited awkwardly, pulling between a curtailed dignity (by not showing it for long) and a "money shot" moment, where you see everything, all at once.
Ultimately, the only thing I came away feeling satisfied and endeared by with Drive, was Cliff Martinez's awesome film score. His use of swirling ambient chords pushes the movie into an ephemeral space that it doesn't necessarily deserve. It's a cloak of gorgeous affection that would have served a well-crafted drama or romance, but here it just conjures up the phantoms of emotion and nothing else. It is, however, a nice relief from the contrived lyrics of the chosen pop songs, like College's "A Real Hero", which is set to the melodramatic backwash of the driver being a sensitive cool-dad to Irene's son. As the girl on the track sings "a hero, a real human being", I just about want to hang myself in the closet.
So Drive is inconsistent and nothing at all special. It can't seem to decide between wanting to be cult cool or straight-up serious, something that foils its impact throughout. Gosling certainly doesn't save the film. All his puppy dog stares and monotone dialogue show exactly what he can do as an actor. I'm sure it was a style choice on the part of Winding Refn, but the truth is, that's not a thrown performance for Gosling, that IS how he acts. Also, it's a tough guy movie where all two of the women characters are irrelevant and always outside the world of heavy things, of violent things and of crime things. Anyway you slice it, aside from the great original score, the film is a monster of style that slowly devours all substance. Of course, this particular monster thinks that if he devours enough, he'll find meaning beneath all the meat.
