I Drive

So, Drive is basically pretty much the movie that everyone’s talking about right now, or was talking about four days ago. I saw it last Saturday, and was alternately thrilled and entirely put out by Nicolas Winding Refn’s greatly enhanced (or is that jumped up?) adaptation of James Sallis’s very slender crime novel. Very slender and spare, which is important. I found myself largely indifferent to the novel, and questioning whether or not the critic who went out of his way to point out that, however spare Sallis’s book was, it wasn’t “skeletal”, was actually right or not. It’s a fine line, but in any case it’s very clear that, regardless of what I think, the tone of Drive the novel was very deliberate, as were the parallels with Walter Hill’s film The Driver, which achieves a spareness (while not being skeletal) on film that Sallis is clearly trying to replicate, in his own way, on the page.

With that in mind, how does Nicolas Winding Refn approach the material? This being the man who directed the Pusher trilogy, Bronson and Valhalla Rising. Well, according to some, Refn’s take on Drive is a minimalist one. After replacing my eyeballs, which had bugged out, lifting my jaw back into place, and letting the blasts of steam from my ears dissipate – I might have also shrieked “Whaaaaaaaaa?”, though of course such trauma leaves one’s memory hazy – I tried to figure out what the living fuck those people were talking about. Because first off, whatever debt Sallis’s novel owes to Walter Hill, Refn is more interested in going into hock with Michael Mann, who I cannot regard as a minimalist filmmaker. Icy, sometimes, fond of the color blue, certainly, but not minimalist. “Minimalist” does not mean, as some seem to believe, that long stretches of a film can go by with very little dialogue. For comparison, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is minimalist; Heat isn’t. And by the way, none of this should be taken as a knock on Drive. For the most part, I really liked the film. I just can’t understand why so many people are intent to misunderstand the meaning of “minimalism”, or to brutally expand the definition to include slow motion shots of exploding heads.

The violence in Drive really is sort of key to this whole thing. I know some have taken issue with the level and non-minimalist extremity of the bloodshed on display here, but I didn’t. Still, let’s not pretend that Refn isn’t indulging his sweet tooth, as it were. About midway through Drive, maybe more, the story really turns into a bloodbath. Or a bloodbath and a bonestorm, given all the crunching you hear, and Ryan Gosling, our star and hero, reveals a side of himself that has hitherto lain dormant. Personally, I found this quite…invigorating? If that’s the right word, I really don’t know what that says about me, but the increased violence in Drive does signal a turn into Crazy Town, and I was right on board for that. In the film, Gosling plays a very quiet (more on that in a moment) man named, either actually (and let’s hope it’s not that) or by Sallis as a way of leaving him nameless, and to nod yet again to Walter Hill, “Driver”. He’s a stuntman, and a getaway driver. As the best getaway driver that has ever been, he demands no involvement in the planning of any heists, or any involvement outside of the understanding that he will be parked where he needs to be, he will give those inside the bank/pawn shop/whatever five minutes to get out and get to his car, and then he will get them to safety. If they’re not out in five minutes, he’s going anyway. Driver’s bona fides are offered in the first scene, which involves him getting away with the aid of a police scanner. This is some terrific filmmaking right here, and about as close to actually being minimalist as Drive ever gets. But anyway, so that’s Driver, and on top of those two jobs he also works in a garage run by Bryan Cranston, who wants Driver to get on the racing circuit, and so he goes to local crime boss Bernie Rose, played exceptionally well by Albert Brooks. In the middle of all this, Driver falls in love with his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), who has a young son, and a husband in prison. The courtship between Driver and Irene comes to a halt when the husband is released, a crime element is thrust back into the lives of Irene and her child, and Driver finds himself with the impulse to viciously protect those he loves, but can’t have.
And so that’s where the violence comes in. But also, when I look at the romance that Refn so desperately wants us to be moved by, I begin to understand the source of those bleats about “minimalism.” Because Driver hardly ever even talks! Even when he’s out on dates with a lady! Look, when I think of taciturn criminals, I think of all those passages in Richard Stark’s Parker novels, where Parker, all the planning done and the period of waiting before the action has just begun, is simply sitting, and Stark describes him watching TV with the sound off, or simply sitting and staring off, looking at nothing. I do not picture Ryan Gosling sitting on a couch watching cartoons and smiling, but speaking in a monotone. But somehow this counts now. Gosling really is a grinny sonofabitch in this, given the role, or the idea of the role, he's supposedly playing. But the single most aggravating thing about Drive is every single conversation Gosling has with Carey Mulligan. The fault, I have to think, does not lie with either of them, but with Refn, who directs them both to wait a full five to ten seconds after one has spoken before the other replies. Is dragging out conversation the same as minimalism now? Add in the fact that during the whole moony-eyed courtship portion of their romance, they actually never say anything of importance or worth, either as character or in terms of good dialogue. It got to a point where, if a scene began with Gosling and Mulligan alone together, I thought "Oh goddamnit, more pausing. Oh Jesus. Oh God no."

"Where do you want to go?"
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"The zoo."
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"Okay."

That's maybe a paraphrase, but you get the idea. It's like listening to two people in the same room having separate phone conversations.

But then, of course, Driver, to paraphrase Harlan Ellison, clouds up and rains all over everybody. The violence, I sensed, is Drive's comfort zone. Refn's pushing himself when he's figuring out the car stuff, but for him splattery violence is like Spike Lee strapping a camera on Denzel Washington's chest and pushing him down the street in a shopping cart (or whatever he does to get that shot in every movie. I don't know, I'm not very technically-minded) -- it's something that has a certain signature effect on the audience that he can do in his sleep. So when it takes over the film, it really takes over. And I admit, for the better. There's quite a bit of it, but three moments stand out for me. One involves Albert Brooks, who is so good here, and if you think his performance is in danger of being overhyped, that's your deal, because I think it's entirely earned. Part of that comes from the brilliantly counter intuitive casting, but that wouldn't work if Brooks couldn't do it, and he does it, most strikingly in the obligatory scene where the crime boss, up to now somewhat removed from everything, proves what he's capable of. A lot of films, too many maybe, have this scene, but there is something honestly shocking about seeing Brooks do it. And it's not just Brooks stabbing a guy (let's keep the description simple); it's Brooks stabbing a guy with a look of pure viciousness on his face.
But that's all perhaps beside my point. The other two moments of violence are carried out by Gosling. One, the much talked about elevator scene, grows from a moment of tenderness between Gosling and Mulligan, and explodes crazily onto the man who would do them harm. The tenderness is shot almost like a moment of fantasy, with a romantic swell of synth music and a change in lighting -- this angelic image is soon covered in blood, and the truth of who Driver is and has been, begins to come home. Which is good because up to now, for all Refn's best efforts, Driver has not exuded mystery. His motivations have been very clear, and they remain clear throughout, certainly, but at least we learn something about him we might not have guessed. Tom Reagen in Miller's Crossing is far more enigmatic than the practically mute Driver, and that guy's always talking his way out of stuff.

Yet the violence actually achieves something, and Refn goes with it. The third, and perhaps most striking, as well as ironically least graphic or bloody by several degrees, bit of violence I want to mention signals a shift if Refn's style. That shift was pretty much there once the previously mentioned head exploded, but when Driver dons the rubber mask he wears to dummy the star of the movie he's doing stuntwork for, and wears it to track down one of his targets, suddenly we're in a horror film. Almost. A slasher film, almost. One commenter online said that Gosling turns into Jason Vorhees, and he's almost right. But not quite. What he is is something out of a film by one of those French extremism guys, but one of the good ones -- Pascal Laugier or Fabrice du Welz or something. This passage of Drive is really eerie, and really strange, and really terrific.

Refn blows the ending a little bit, though. I won't say how, but for a second he looked prepared to deviate even further from Sallis's novel -- which he'd already deviated from quite a bit -- but then he doesn't, and the rather ill-judged 80s-esque song "A Real Hero", which is meant to highlight Driver's good side, don't you know, kicks back in, and, well, I think Refn should have pushed through and ended it the way he made you think he was going to. The climactic showdown had been so great up to that point, too. It wasn't minimalist, of course, but who ever claimed it was supposed to be?