The hero of “Drive” (Ryan
Gosling) is unnamed, from start to finish. That fact alone puts him in
distinguished company: with the Preacher in “Pale Rider” (1985), for
instance, played by Clint Eastwood, who had already enshrined the Man
with No Name in three al-dente Westerns. The first of them, “A Fistful
of Dollars” (1964), was the direct offspring of Akira Kurosawa’s
“Yojimbo,” which, in turn, was a first cousin once removed of Dashiell
Hammett’s “Red Harvest,” a novel whose protagonist, with a heart like a
corn husk, was known only as the Continental Op. And so this mini-band
of brothers—unsmiling, unidentified, but all too recognizable—continues
to grow. To qualify, you need only do a clean and thorough job, whatever
the smuts of a dirty world. If you have to break heads, do it in a good
cause. And, above all, whether you’re in charge of a horse or an
Impala, ride hard.
The first car that is assigned to our guy, in
“Drive,” is indeed a Chevy Impala, in numbing silver-gray. “No one will
be looking at you,” he is told, and that’s the point. Though tuned and
buffed under the hood, the Chevy remains a heroically dull machine,
perhaps the least memorable chase weapon since Roy Scheider clambered
into a Pontiac Ventura, the color of a very tired squirrel, in “The
Seven-Ups” (1973). That model was even glummer than the Pontiac
LeMans—who was kidding whom, with that name?—in which Gene Hackman raced
against an Elevated train, two years earlier, in “The French
Connection”; and both, of course, were nothing beside the gleaming
flanks of the Mustang used in “Bullitt” (1968). If you want to be seen,
like Steve McQueen, you sport your car as if it were a suit, tailor made
to your skills. If you want to fade into the background, though, like
the fellow in “Drive,” you get something you can steal and leave behind.
The
Driver—we have to call him something, I guess—lives in L.A., where he
moonlights as a getaway man. Not that there’s much of a moon. The
director, Nicolas Winding Refn, prefers the glow of neon, stop signs,
and the pools of light that leak through a garage. It takes a while to
learn what the Driver does in sunshine, and the discovery feeds the
smartest scene in the movie. The day after he and the Impala ferry a
pair of thieves away from a warehouse robbery, we find him walking along
in police uniform. Great twist, we think: a cop who helps robbers after
hours. But then, just as we’re digesting that news, he gets into a
police vehicle, guns it, and crashes it, with a camera crew looking on.
He’s
not a cop, after all, but a stunt driver, playing a cop,
doubling for an actor who can’t be risked in a smash. To sum up: in the
space of a few minutes, our take on this man has flipped and rolled
over, twice, and nothing is quite what it seems. Anyone seeing the title
of the movie and hoping for a pedal-stomping update on “Convoy” or
“Smokey and the Bandit” will, by now, be feeling a mite confused.
Naturally,
the Driver lives alone. Down the hall is the apartment of Irene (Carey
Mulligan) and her son, Benicio (Kaden Leos). The Driver meets her and,
against regulations, falls in love; at any rate, he cracks a smile, and
twitches the toothpick that sits at the side of his mouth, so something
must be stirring in his soul. The boy’s father, Standard (Oscar Isaac),
is in jail, and, when he comes out, the Driver, far from showing
hostility, befriends him, and offers assistance—a courtly, old-fashioned
gesture, as though he lacked any better way of expressing his feelings
for Irene. If Lancelot had lived next door to Guinevere, he would have
done the same. Standard needs dough to pay off prison debts, which means
taking part in a heist. The plan is that the Driver will chauffeur him
to and from the job, without letting Irene hear about it. Needless to
say, the plan backfires, and both men fall prey to some unsavory
specimens, led by Bernie (Albert Brooks), with a glittering collection
of knives, and Nino (Ron Perlman), who looks like something out of “The
Descent of Man.”
A surprisingly high fraction of “Drive” is
indebted to “The Driver,” Walter Hill’s whittled-down thriller of 1978.
The two films share that first pursuit, through a velvet-dark L.A.; the
often wordless hero; a troublesome bag of cash; automobiles that don’t
simply whisk along but hide in corners, like cats; and the spare bursts
of music, with Refn opting for an electronic underthrob, at the start,
that nags like a migraine. Yet he also veers away from Hill in striking
fashion, ditching any notion of a cop as a suitable nemesis (“The
Driver” brought on Bruce Dern at his loopiest), and choosing, for a
heroine, not the blank beauty of Isabelle Adjani, who appeared to be
molded from porcelain, but the vulnerable sweetness of Carey Mulligan,
whose smile would cause many road users to lose their grip and cannon
into a lamppost. Last, nothing in Hill’s film is as entertaining as
Bernie’s riff on his past career. In the nineteen-eighties, it appears,
before launching into crime, he produced movies. “One critic called them
European,” he recalls, adding, “I thought they were shit.” Credit to
Refn, who is Danish, for running that gag.
All this is excellent
news, which makes it doubly wretched to report that, having delighted in
the doominess of “Drive,” as its journey began, I ended much less
joyful than repelled. What happened? In short, an explosion—not of a
flaming car, or a bombed building, but of a head. (Whose head, I will
not reveal, except to say that to damage such a performer, whether with a
slap or, as here, with a shotgun, strikes me as a crime against
nature.) Refn seems to have a thing about heads, and about the hurt that
they can suffer—capital punishment, in the worst sense. We watch as the
Driver stamps, time and again, on the skull of a villain in an
elevator; but what exactly are we watching, as the camera rests, for a
second, on the mashed-up result? Prosthetics, pixellation, pastry dough?
The people around me reacted with the
eewrrgh sound that has
become de rigueur in the viewing of violence, followed by the
traditional hasty giggle to pop the tension; even those moviegoers who
revel in such a sight, however, might usefully pause to inspect the kick
of pleasure that it provokes. No doubt they will have seen much worse,
and they will also know that a bursting brain is no more real than a
game of Quidditch, yet what perturbs me about a film as careful and as
intelligent as “Drive” is its manifest delusion that, in refusing to
look away from the minutiae of nastiness, it is actually drawing us
closer to the truth about pain.
This is not so. When James Stewart
was deliberately shot in the hand, from close range, in “The Man from
Laramie” (1955), we did not witness the bullet enter his flesh, nor did
we need to. The director, Anthony Mann, knew that his proper focus,
moral as well as physical, should be on Stewart’s face, which turned
into a writhing map of outrage, agony, and shame—a peculiar, emasculated
shame, as befitted a cowboy who lived by the sweat of his hands.
Compare the sequence, in “Drive,” in which Albert Brooks shakes a man’s
hand and, holding tight, slices through the veins in his wrist.
Brooks—the most prominent presence in the movie, caustically cast
against type—tells his victim not to worry. “It’s over, it’s over,” he
says, and the pitiless soothing of his voice, as the man’s lifeblood
ebbs away, is unforgettable, but it’s difficult to concentrate, because
Refn is far too concerned to show the fountain of that blood, and its
ridiculous leap. In grabbing our attention, he diverts it from what
matters. The horror lingers and seeps; the feelings are sponged away.
That
is true of “Drive” as a whole. Ryan Gosling is a touch too sympathetic
for the freeze-dried, laconic Driver whom we follow in the first half,
and, once the mood is fractured and he starts to dish out bestial
beatings, that stillness is badly devalued. He becomes ever harder to
believe in, however fervent he is meant to be in defending the helpless
Irene, and the suspicion arises that he might be not so much a rounded
character as a card in a game of style. Even his clothes make scant
dramatic sense. He wears a quilted silver jacket with a gold scorpion
embroidered on the back, and keeps on wearing it when the fabric is
smeared with gore, but why would a man so clearly defined elsewhere by
the spirit of self-effacement take such a risk? It must be because Refn,
rather than his hero, admires the kitschy shine of the garment, and the
way that—like the savagery, the speed, and all the foul mouths—it folds
into his vision of the city. There is no shortage of pulse and finesse
in that vision; “Drive” marks the first occasion on which Refn has shot a
film in America, and, like countless outsiders before him, he casts an
eye that is at once entranced and stunned. By his own admission, though,
he doesn’t have a license, and it shows. The man behind “Drive” can’t
drive.
♦
