In the realm of pop music, the last decade will sadly be remembered as the decade of reunions, reissues, and rehashing. The best tours were largely by bands reuniting and playing the catalogues of their youths. The best records out were reissues of records that had an average age of twenty years old. This decade finds this depressingly contagious trend infecting Hollywood. Like watching MTV become COMPLETELY taken over by reality television, Hollywood's bread and butter has been remakes or films that are blatantly referencing others. This month's 'Drive' is guilty of the latter; but I don't care, because it's referencing exactly the kind of film I grew up on, exactly the kind of film that made me fall in love with movies, exactly the kind of film I miss. And its thinly-veiled. At one point, Albert Brooks' gangster tells Ryan Gosling's Driver how he met their mutual acquaintance: "We used to make action movies together in the '80s". The music is all sentimental 80's pop (done by some modern French group), the cars are all vintage, and the font in the opening credits is directly referencing 'Into The Night', 'Risky Business', and 'To Live and Die in L.A.'.
The story will not be blowing anyone away, its a classic nail-biter: amateur criminal gets in over his head and accidentally ends up taking on the mob alone. Ryan Gosling is our hero, a man with no name who works as a mechanic by day, a stunt driver in his downtime, and a getaway driver by night. Soon he falls for his pretty young neighbor and her young son. Just as their relationship is about to evolve, her husband returns from prison and brings trouble home with him that threatens to hurt everyone. When The Driver offers his getaway services and everything goes terribly wrong, he ends up stuck with mob money that they refuse to take back peacefully.
From here, the Driver's character opens up a whole other side to him which is 'Drive's biggest movie reference, 'Taxi Driver'. Like Travis Bickle, he's a quiet man with the mysterious past who roams the streets, desperately needing to let the violence within him get out. There is a considerable suspension of reality as the Driver suddenly has the goods to kill with the power of a mercenary and instinctively handle himself in these brutal situations. But Gosling recently described 'Drive' as "a fairy tale and a myth". His lone-wolf is truly something out of a western. He says little, is close to no one, and yet manages to seduce an everyday, working class mom. I guess its best to just enjoy the ride and drink in the ambiance.
This will be easy to do as 'Drive' was made by a Dane who shoots with the eye of a foreigner's loving gaze at the American landscape (see also 'Paris, Texas', 'Bad Lieutenant - Port Of Call: New Orleans'). Very much like Michael Mann's 'Heat' and Christopher Nolan's 'Memento', Nicolas Winder Refn's 'Drive' is an L.A. movie: a modernist film noir that takes the viewer through the endless sprawl of Los Angeles. The twinkling skyscrapers at night, the web of freeways, the palm trees lurking in the background, and the piece of shit strip mall culture are all front and center here. There's even ominous, pulsating ambient tones throughout, compliments of Cliff Martinez. But few L.A. movies have half of Refn's style. He loves his slow motion tracking shots (which he uses to great effect in a sequence near the end), lights many of his interiors with a golden tinge or a blinding sense of the sunlight outside, and even uses 'Point Blank' style jump-cutting. But none of these will leave half the impression that his violence will. Often totally unnecessary, the bloodshed will run down the aisles of the theaters. Europeans often make us look like softies.
'Drive' is part gangster-drama, part car chase thriller, part western, part L.A. noir. Whatever you take out of it, its remarkable in its own right and very much worth catching in the theater. Great to see Albert Brooks here.
