Actor Ryan’s Gosling’s character in “Drive” proves it’s impossible to live in two worlds. He tries, but fails. Gosling, however, succeeds in creating one of this year’s most compelling film characters. By day, his nameless driver does car stunts for B movies, and by night, he moonlights as a wheelman, no questions asked.
“I’ll give you five minutes. For those five minutes, I’m yours. Anything that happens one minute on either side of those five minutes is not my concern,” he tells a client on the phone in the film’s opening scene. In the minutes that follow, we watch as he picks up two men at the tail end of a robbery and then disappears into the traffic of Los Angeles. The scene, with its blend of noir lighting, layered sound (the driver listens to a police radio and a baseball game at the same time), and calculated, strategic driving is brilliant and sets up “Drive” as something special. Director Nicolas Winding Refn spends a lot of time focusing on the driver’s face rather than the action outside the car, elegantly setting up the character as someone worth watching.
This world is brutal. When Driver agrees to drive a racecar backed by a Jewish mobster, he unwittingly steps into a blood-soaked nightmare. The violence is extreme, and hard to watch, but never over the top. Skulls explode in bright red showers of meat, and people are cut into gory ribbons, but the carnage never seems unrealistic. Gosling’s driver simply gets mixed up with savage people. There’s a clear contrast between these scenes and those in which the driver develops a mutual attraction with a married mother living next to him. In these scenes, Driver smiles, plays with the woman’s young son, and watches over her while her husband is in prison. His personality seems to rise to the surface from wherever he’s buried it.
Even the dialogue establishes a clear dividing line between the two worlds: in one, it’s riddled with profanity; in the other, it’s as clean as a Disney movie. Between “Blue Valentine,” “All Good Things,” “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” and “Drive,” Gosling is having a phenomenal year. And in each movie, he’s played a character unlike any of the others. His performance as a womanizing philanderer was one of the best things about “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” and here, he creates a character defined solely by his behavior. He rarely speaks, shows little to no emotion, and has no past to speak of – although his skills in a fight and the scorpion embroidered on the back of his jacket suggest what his life has been like.
Yet Gosling brings the kind of charisma to the role that’s reminiscent of actors from the ’60s and ’70s, like Steve McQueen in “Bullitt” and Clint Eastwood in “The Man With No Name.” His delivery, timing, and expressions are all low key, but his presence in each scene is strong. Gosling seems capable of accomplishing anything, and I can’t wait to see what he’s done in “The Ides of March,” his next movie. I’m also looking forward to digging into Refn’s filmography, as all of the decisions he made for “Drive” were good ones. He avoids handheld camera work, uses wide-angle lenses, and saturates the night scenes with stark contrasts of light and shadows. He also eschews computer-generated imagery, which grounds his car chases in realism.
One stunt is especially impressive for the way it combines skilled driving with good camera work. In the scene, Gosling’s character drives backwards while nose-to-nose with the pursuing car, and then does a 180 while making a U-turn. Somehow, the camera follows his car through the turn without missing a beat. The well-choreographed and executed stunt makes the shaky camera work and bloated CGI action scenes in other movies seem lazy in comparison. For Gosling and Refn, “Drive” is a agraceful exercise in style. They combine elements of movies from the ’60s (the character work), the ’70s (the car chases), and the ’80s (the moody atmosphere) to create a film more gripping and watchable than most of today’s blockbusters. If you can stomach the violence, catch “Drive” in a theater with a big screen and good audio.
Rated R for brutal, bloody violence, language and nudity. Three-and-a-half stars out of four. Email David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.