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. ♦
ILLUSTRATION: TES ONE
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2011/09/26/110926crci_cinema_lane#ixzz1n4dvT6gC
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