Drive (2011) – Review

It’s always a fascinating thing when a director with a more elusive style makes something that accessible enough to be embraced by the general audience. It’s almost a perfect storm of separate events that sees casting, vision and subject allign at the exact moment to set the zeitgeist on fire and create something special. Drive is one of those moments.
Up until Drive, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn has made several enticing, but elusive movie that had put him on the map, but hadn’t yet broke him into the mainstream. His Pusher trilogy was well received, Valhalla Rising was a wonderfully counter intuitive Viking epic with almost no dialogue and Bronson took the life of Britain’s most violent prison inmate and turned it into an eccentric performance piece. However, once he turned his eye to an LA set, neo noir, all the pieces suddenly clicked and not even the fact that some people misread the trailer as a Fast And Furious rip-off was enough to lock the film’s gearstick in neutral.

We are introduced to the monosyllabic, brooding, Driver as we see him gearing up for his side job as a getaway driver for hire. After laying out some unbreakable rules that sound like they’ve come right out of Jason Statham’s Transporter movies, he manages to evade cop cars and police helicopters with a deft mixture or skill and smarts that radiate off him in waves of unimaginable cool. Once we’ve established this, we find out that during his day hours, Driver is a part time stuntman who whwn he isn’t flipping cars on set, he’s working as a mechanic for opportunistic gangster wannabe, Shannon, who acts as his manager in all of his automotive endeavours. But beyond cars, Driver is very much a man divorced from the rest of humanity as you feel that there’s a fair amount of darkness lurking behind those morose, soulful, puppy dog eyes.
However, Driver seems to think that he has a chance to live a normal life and feel normal things via his neighbour, Irene and her son Benicio and after managing to break the ice with them he manages to get a taste of the life of average joe. However, neo-noirs aren’t usually known for their happy ever afters and soon, Irene’s husband, Standard, is released from prison and it seems that Driver is about to lose the connection he has managed to form. The plot thickens when it’s revealed that Standard owes a substantial amount of money to various crooks who gave him protection inside and so to help out Irene and Benicio even further, Driver agrees to be the wheelman in a robbery which should pay off all the debts.
Of course, everything goes wrong and worse yet, the stolen money in question puts terrifying local gangsters Bernie and Nino in something of a bind as a tangled set of circumstances means Driver and Standard’s action incriminate them to the mob. Can Driver manage to unravel this mess and get the happily ever after he didn’t even know he wanted?

On paper, Drive seems pretty standard. I mean how many other movies have you seen that feature a sullen anti-hero that jeopardises his entire existence by stepping out of his brooding comfort zone to try and dream of a normal existence? Crime, action, drama, westerns, they’ve all got a wealth of complex-but-silent leads who upheave a lifetime of controlled behavior for the chance of an idyllic world where families skip stones on a lake while the sun beams from a bright blue sky. And yet, while the tyre treads on this type of movie may be as bald as a junked old banger, Refn ensures that there’s a slick, purring engine under the hood that runs on pure premium.
As Valhalla Rising and Bronson proved, Refn seems to be quite fond of mythic characters and Ryan Gosling’s Driver certainly fits the bill with aplomb with a selection of quirks and tics that stand to fill in the more ethereal aspects of his personality. Donning a silver stuntman’s jacket with a scorpion stitched on the back, chewing on a toothpick and flexing his mitts in leather driving gloves that creak satisfyingly every time he balls up a fist, he seems a man that’s stepped right out of urban legend as he delivers terse speeches about his rules and nimbly avoids the spotlights of police helicopters like his tyres have been pumped with pure fairy dust. In lesser hands, Driver would seem like parody, but the stylish flare Refn weaves is backed up impressively by those absurdly soulful eyeballs that Gosling possesses who managed to do more with protracted scenes of mournful silence than most can with a three page monologue. In fact, taking its cue from its lead, Drive is a film where the things left unsaid are arguably more important than the actual dialogue and never is this more evident than in the relationship between Gosling and Carey Mulligan’s Irene who share meaningful, yearning glances that seem to speak volumes despite said emotions remaining defiantly unsaid.

The rest of the cast obviously can’t fall back on non-verbal instances of doomed romance (no one would speak otherwise), so thankfully the film has a raft of major talents to build the world around this central romance. Bryan Cranston gives it his best hard luck sad sack as Driver’s luckless mentor, while Ron Perlman snarls a lot as the brutish Nino, Christina Hendricks delivers low rent vamp and an embryonic Oscar Issac complicates matters as Irene’s recently freed hudband; but it’s Albert Brooks (aka. Nemo’s fucking dad) who truly brings the thunder as a seemingly rational crime boss who has quite the affinity for fucking up people with sharp implements at the drop of a hat and it’s so cool that someone who usually plays stressed neurotics can be so legitimately terrifying.
However, never one to be outdone by his own cast, Nicolas Winding Refn gives the film a super slick ambience that’s drenched in brooding electronica that makes the LA streets come alive with menace. I’m not sure if there are other songs that could lay down an entire movie’s tone better than Nightcall by Kavinsky and Lovefoxxx does here, but if there is it’ll be damn close. Elsewhere, Refn snaps the movie (and by extention, the viewer) out of its impressively cool haze by dropping in shocking bursts of violence and unsettling surreal imagery. One minute the film dazzles you with a romantic, almost dreamlike, interlude in an elevator and then devastatingly breaks it by having Gosling stomp a would-be attacker’s head into guacamole; elsewhere, Driver stalks his prey wearing a lifelike, rubber mask lifted from a film set, but the movie is so well judged, it gives everything a hypnotic, trance like feel, even when indulging in said brutality.

Essentially a modern day fairy tail that feels like it’s been dipped in pure mescaline, Refn, Gosling and company deliver a strangely beautiful take on the concept of the knight in shining armour (or should that be bomber jacket) that hits the nail right on the head. Sure, they’ll be some who will find the near wordless love story and the lashings of style a bit pretentious, but it still stands as Refn’s most accomplished work as it revs the engine on a savagely soulful piece of work.
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