If you’re just reading about Drive for the first time, you’d be forgiven for grouping in a class with movies like White Heat or, more recently, The Town. It shares with those films one of the classic storylines of Hollywood crime flicks: a seemingly simple job goes wrong, leaving the principals involved to pick up the pieces and do their best to escape with their lives. Such is the case in Drive, wherein Ryan Gosling plays a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as an expert getaway man.
Yet Drive, muscularly directed by Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, is more akin to Blade Runner, another dreamy, dark vision of Los Angeles, or even There Will Be Blood, two other examples of that rare breed of film that prefers images to words. Make no mistake: this is easily the most stylish movie that you’ll see in theaters this year, and the most visually evocative, as well (with due respect to the ambitious project of The Tree of Life). And, though it quickly establishes its bona fides as a full-bodied thriller in the pulse-pounding, white-knuckle opening scene, an accomplishment all the more remarkable for the almost total lack of dialogue and pyrotechnics, it is also an enormously complex piece of work, one that pushes the boundaries of what film is capable of.
The film’s Los Angeles is a place of richly saturated color and endless lights, a creation akin to Michael Mann’s cityscapes or, on a smaller scale, to the Memphis of Hustle and Flow, another movie about desperate dreams. It is also a place where the line between those dreams and the reality of sudden, horrific violence is so thin as to be almost nonexistent. Indeed, Drive’s atonal use of violence is offputting and seems initially out of place in a movie that at other times comes so close to visual poetry. I’m still not convinced that it isn’t overdone, but the point is clear: dream as we might, there is nothing beautiful in death.
A few words must be spared, as well, for both for the film’s performances and its soundtrack, which is reminiscent of the synth-heavy scores of ‘80s classics like Chariots of Fire and the aforementioned Blade Runner, and which is almost as central to creating the style of the film as the photography it is paired with. Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, meanwhile, might well have complained about not having anything to work with — there’s comparatively little dialogue, especially for Gosling’s stoic driver — but, as with so much about this film, less is apparently more. Neither character says all that much (though Mulligan’s Irene is certainly more talkative), but the fact that they’re both able to communicate so much with no more than their bodies and faces and the occasional gesture makes both performances remarkable.
It’s rare that I can find nothing negative of substance to say about a movie. Drive is one of those, and the first I’ve seen in theaters since, probably, There Will Be Blood. There are other releases to be excited about in 2011, but I have a hard time seeing how they’ll top this one.
