Drive (100 Minutes)
This movie loves a hallway, loves neon pink, parking garages, and has the best slow-motion kiss to violent death scene in existence.
I’m back in the driver’s seat (see what I did there) after a good amount of time off traveling around Southern Europe followed by a work trip to Toronto. I didn’t watch TV or a single movie while away so being back here, watching 3-5 movies in a week, and now analyzing one, feels more challenging than usual. But if you’ll allow me, I’ll shake the cobwebs off by writing about a favorite of mine-- Drive (2011).
If you haven’t seen Drive I strongly suggest you do ASAP and maybe even before finishing this post. It is unlike anything you’ve seen recently and is well worth the watch. But, if you’re just SO eager to keep reading, I’ll give you that quick plot overview: Driver (Ryan Gosling), no other name, is a mechanic and stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway car driver for hire in LA. His work is managed by Shannon (Bryan Cranston) who is always looking for the next best thing in his life (to his own detriment) and starts to work out a driving deal with a couple of mobsters (Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman). While that is happening, Driver starts to build a relationship with Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son Benicio, which is cut short when her husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) is released from prison early. He comes with some prison/crime baggage Driver agrees to help him out with…
Unlike many of the other movies I write about, I don’t think I need to do much to qualify my love for this one. It has a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and was a box office success making more than double its budget. It was well-received, is well-liked, and is a cornerstone of Ryan Gosling’s career. What hasn’t been extensively covered, however, is that this gem is also only 100-minutes long. I approached several people about this and they were shocked to find the movie fit within my window of runtime. Still, it manages to carry a lot of weight and loom large in our memory with silence, subtlety, and soundtrack.
And that’s exactly where I want to start. The soundtrack is doing THE MOST in this movie, OK? I am not normally one who pays a lot of attention to soundtrack. I know as a film fan that’s not really something I should admit to, but I am always honest so crucify me if you must. It is rare that I listen to a soundtrack from beginning to end (and even rarer I still do it years later) but Cliff Martinez’s Drive soundtrack is absolutely one of them. Between Martinez’s synth-pop score and the electro-pop songs hand-selected by director Nicolas Winding Refn, the soundtrack is an ethereal, atmospheric trip that transports us to another world-- even though the movie is set in modern-day Los Angeles. This soundtrack creates that weird feeling of nostalgia for a place I’ve never been-- I long for it and remember it but I’ve never actually been there. Like a dream or deja vu. Germans call this feeling “fernweh”, which directly translates to “farsickness.”
With a shooting script that was something like 80 pages and only got shorter as they filmed, the movie relies a lot on the music to evoke emotion, where normally we’d have lengthy back and forths between characters, voiceovers, or diary entries-- or all three. The acting is superb and I’ll get there in a second, but without the soundtrack filling in emotional blanks for us, we’d be a little unmoved, maybe even a little bored. Take the homecoming party scene for Standard:
Driver and Irene are separated, back into their old lives where Irene is the dutiful, caring wife and Driver is spending more time with machines than people. Desire’s “Under Your Spell” guides us through this bit. Unless you don’t have a pulse, we want Driver and Irene to be missing one another. We hope they’re missing one another. “Under Your Spell” says to us, yes they are thinking of each other. Yes, there is longing there. In fact, Johnny Jewel of Desire has said upon watching the scene, “I got chills, because it's a real song—’I fell in love and then I was sick’—and it's used in the movie in the exact same way that I was feeling it when I wrote it. He (Refn) definitely got the nuance of the song, and understood what it was supposed to mean, and he wanted to give that emotion to the viewer, that same feeling.”
Whew. Now that’s how you pick a song.
In addition to the score and pop songs featured in the film, I find that the engines of the cars play a part in this soundtrack as well. They’re always rising and falling to meet the energy and emotion of Driver. Speaking for him when he does not or can not.
I’m giving the soundtrack a lot of weight but that doesn’t mean that Gosling and Mulligan aren’t giving great performances. Their characters exchange a few lines and when they do, they’re seemingly innocuous. “That was good,” Irene says after a day spent together. In any other setting, it’s a pretty bland statement. But here, Gosling is smirking, eyes alight and Mulligan is breathing heavily. They’re happy in this small way, in this small moment. I have to actually know if Carey Mulligan breathes that heavily in real life or if she is doing some serious chest acting in this movie. With so few lines, I have to think it’s all intentional. There’s another scene where Irene, Benicio, Driver, and Standard are having dinner together and though Irene is smiling, her chest is rising and falling with anxiety at what may happen next. (Give her the Oscar in breath acting, please.)
Their chemistry is undeniable and so much of the movie relies on this aspect. We have to believe they’d be good together so that there are stakes to them being apart when Standard comes home with all his baggage. It’s this chemistry that keeps the movie from becoming too “much”, too heavy, too atmospheric. The characters are grounded even while living in a neon pink, synth-pop fairytale. I think a lot of films don’t strike this balance. In fact, Refn himself is not immune. If you want to be horribly disturbed just pop on Only God Forgives which is Drive on some sort of steroid or maybe even acid. Gosling’s character is cold, unfeeling, and super violent. And his environment reflects this back to him. Those around him are just as violent. It’s dark and unforgiving--which maybe the title reflects, but doesn’t make it a better movie. Without contrast you’re left with just atmosphere and violence.
So, you have this amazing fernweh soundtrack just pumping your system full of longing. You have Gosling and Mulligan doing their best heaving chest acting-- tell me I’m wrong-- and you have Refn and Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel doing what I’m going to call 80s does Film Noir does Present Day LA. This movie loves a hallway, loves neon pink, parking garages, and has the best slow-motion kiss to violent death scene in existence. (Is it the only one?)
That brings me finally to the violence of the film which I’ve hinted at throughout this (which is now officially my longest post to date). Some critics of the film found Drive to be too violent and thought it hurt the story and the picture overall. But I disagree. I am not a fan of egregious violence in movies and definitely don’t go looking for it. In fact, I’ve challenged myself and my partner to write an action movie script without any guns, just to see what it would be like. I noted that we don’t even get a hint of the violence Driver is capable of until 40 minutes in when he threatens a past client in a diner. We also learn over conversation what the mobsters are capable of rather than seeing it firsthand. It’s one thing to do a cut scene where they torture some guy, it’s another to have a supporting character limp for half the movie before finding out he had his hip broken because a deal went sour.
Is there violence? Absolutely. And it’s very, very visceral. The violence of this movie perhaps carries more weight because the rest of the picture is very fairytale-like. Driver is handsome, charming, passionate, stoic and then in a split second he is not and he’s bashing a dude’s head in. I think there are plenty of movies more violent, we just don’t feel as closely tied to the violence, surprised by it, or confused by it. We’re invested in our lead character having a good life and then he does some very not good things. We hate to feel that, don’t we?
In the end, Driver takes off leaving LA and everyone in it behind. My partner asked me if I thought he lived in the end and I was surprised. Of course he does, I thought. I didn’t even know it was a question. I see how it is left a bit up in the air but for me, I don’t think this is the first time Driver has had to leave a city under such dire circumstances. And I imagine he will continue to.
PS - I didn’t even get a chance to get into Albert Brooks’ amazing performance in this movie. It is amazing and deserves to be recognized. Maybe I should do a part two for this? Let me know…
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Martinez
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/drive-2011
https://www.amazon.com/Drive-inspired-major-starring-Gosling-ebook/dp/B0079ZWGVU