Drive Review - A Moment of Neon Movie Beauty

Drive (2011)

I'm going to nail my flag to the mast straight from the off on this one. I love Drive . No, I don't love it, I've become obsessed by it. When I watched Drive for the first time, when the credits rolled, I got myself a drink and hit play on the DVD again. That's only ever happened to me a handful of times. Of all the films I've watched over the last few years this is the one I go back to the most. With every watch it gets better, reveals more and bares a part of its guts never seen before. 

Driver is a stunt driver, working film sets. Between stunt jobs he works at Shannon’s garage. Between those jobs he works as a getaway driver. When he moves into a new apartment he meets his neighbour and her son.

That’s your set up for the movie, and really, the entire movie hinges on the last line above – he meets his neighbour and her son. Everything else that happens in the film comes from that small moment, everything.

Other reviews claim that the film is all style and no substance. Neon lights covering up for lack of depth. That staggers me. I’ll speculate that this reaction gets wheeled out is because of the economy of the film. The writing by Hossein Amini is so pared-down it’s close to a blank page. There’s no showboating acting, no big “I love you moments”, very little screaming and shouting, there are just clues as to what is happening inside the characters and between them, and that demands that you fill in the blanks. You are not there to be spoonfed, you are there to join the dots. This is a film of emotion as action. Controlled emotion, flickers of emotion rising to the surface in a line or a look, emotion that cracks and breaks out in brief bursts of blinding intensity. Below the surface of this film there’s twenty feet of substance, but you have to be paying attention, you have to want to see it. Just because they don’t shout it out doesn’t mean it’s not there.

One of the elements of beauty in Drive is that it doesn't give a monkey's about backstory. Driver has no history. We learn a big fat nothing about where he's been, what he's done and who he might be outside of his jobs. It's all about what's happening now. So many films are built around something that happened in the past, a secret about to get out. Those story techniques can work well, but they're over-used to the point of laziness. Drive flicks the V at that. Its intensity comes from its hard focus on the moment we're in right now. There is a scene in the last third of the movie as Driver and Irene are together in a lift that illustrates this - beautiful and tender, but your heart's in your mouth at the same time because you know that by the end of the scene that beauty will be gone, so you try and hold on to that beauty for all it's worth. 

Ryan Gosling is mesmerizing as the laconic Driver, but his scenes with Carey Mulligan’s Irene have the most weight. She matches him shot for shot. They’re quietly riffing off each other, being brave enough to leave the space between lines of dialogue, telling a feeling or a thought in a slight movement or half-smile. The unusual thing about Drive is that all the characters get a shot at being great. Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, Christina Hendricks and Oscar Isaac. Some of these roles are small with the actors getting little screen time, but they all have their moment in the sun, they all matter in the scheme of the film.

Nicolas Winding Refn is a director with a unique eye on the world, often up close and tight on his characters, and very much in love with his leading man’s face. He plays the slow, burning scenes expertly against the fast moments of action and violence. Like Driver he speeds up and slows down at all the right moments.

All the elements of this film slot together seamlessly. Cliff Martinez’s soundtrack (with a handful of songs by other artists), for example, is the aural equivalent of streetlights and neon. It’s not incidental music, it’s essential music. Vital to the feeling of the scene and is used to tell the story - synths and beats like a nervous heart help us realise the tension that the characters are under. So often when you listen to the soundtrack without actually watching the film it feels like there’s something missing, but not here. I listen to this a lot. It’s a late night album for me.

I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about the ending of this film purely because it’s left open, like that’s a bad thing. Someone’s had the nerve to make a film that isn’t all neatly tied up with everything in its place, “Yeah, but, yeah right, I wanted to know if Driver…” That’s the point of Drive . It leaves us to wonder what might happen next. As we don’t know Driver’s backstory we don’t know what his future will be either. The moment has passed.

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