There has been a trend lately in action cinema which says that more is better. More cuts, more sound, more plot. More, more, more. Some films have been more successful in employing this method (the Crank and Bourne films come to mind) than others, but Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, which won him the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, refutes all of that by being tremendously exciting on its own stripped-down merits, without resorting to forced freneticism.
Drive’s plot couldn’t be more boilerplate. Driver (Ryan Gosling) is a soft-spoken Hollywood stunt guy who doubles as a getaway man. He lives a simple life, spending his days in a garage for his boss (a wonderful Bryan Cranston) and his nights running thugs through the streets of Los Angeles. Things get a bit complicated when he agrees to do a favor for the partner of the woman he loves (Carey Mulligan), and gets a bit too deeply involved with a high-ranking L.A. crime boss (played with a devilish insouciance by Albert Brooks). Double-crosses and explosive violence ensue.
So far, so familiar. But Refn, a polarizing Danish director whose previous films have been preternaturally brutal investigations into the most violent, cavernous recesses of man’s collective conscience, inflects what little of Hossein Amini’s script there is with a pulsing, monumentally cosmic style that makes the action meaningful while sacrificing little intensity. Drive most obviously diverges from its overly energized action-movie brethren through the expert staging of its car chases and gunfights, which are brutally violent and geographically consistent in ways that afford the mayhem a tautness so often missing amid the quick cuts and whipping cameras of other films. And Gosling, an indispensable presence and a born movie star, guides us through it all without saying more than a few sentences at a time. He’s comforting, confident, and subtly menacing, sometimes within the same scene.
Perhaps the most striking thing about Drive is that Refn has directed it in such a way that it seems like a part of a much larger universe. His vision emerges relentlessly and triumphantly from the many renditions of L.A. we have seen on film to give the city a thrillingly ambient beauty that seems almost otherworldly, and Cliff Martinez’s throbbing, Tangerine Dream-esque synth score makes the film seem like such a deeply felt retro throwback to the measured crime films of the 80s that it becomes positively new again. Few action films (or just films, for that matter), are more evocative; from each of Drive’s many inside-the-car POV shots, the lights outside flitter ominously, the engine revs, the dashboard gleams, and all the while we get the feeling that it all has weight, that it means something. For Refn, every frame is a force.
Drive is, in so many ways, the direct antithesis to what we have become conditioned to seeing when we go to big studio action movies. It is careful, calculated, and slow. The violence, when it comes, is unfetishized and meaningful, every shot has purpose, and every cut is fluid and sensible. It retains a thematic bluntness that is as evocative in its guardedness as it is refreshing in its simplicity, and it never sacrifices its pointed humanistic nuance in favor of a needlessly convoluted narrative. Drive is a symphony among cacophonies.
Drive’s plot couldn’t be more boilerplate. Driver (Ryan Gosling) is a soft-spoken Hollywood stunt guy who doubles as a getaway man. He lives a simple life, spending his days in a garage for his boss (a wonderful Bryan Cranston) and his nights running thugs through the streets of Los Angeles. Things get a bit complicated when he agrees to do a favor for the partner of the woman he loves (Carey Mulligan), and gets a bit too deeply involved with a high-ranking L.A. crime boss (played with a devilish insouciance by Albert Brooks). Double-crosses and explosive violence ensue.
So far, so familiar. But Refn, a polarizing Danish director whose previous films have been preternaturally brutal investigations into the most violent, cavernous recesses of man’s collective conscience, inflects what little of Hossein Amini’s script there is with a pulsing, monumentally cosmic style that makes the action meaningful while sacrificing little intensity. Drive most obviously diverges from its overly energized action-movie brethren through the expert staging of its car chases and gunfights, which are brutally violent and geographically consistent in ways that afford the mayhem a tautness so often missing amid the quick cuts and whipping cameras of other films. And Gosling, an indispensable presence and a born movie star, guides us through it all without saying more than a few sentences at a time. He’s comforting, confident, and subtly menacing, sometimes within the same scene.
Perhaps the most striking thing about Drive is that Refn has directed it in such a way that it seems like a part of a much larger universe. His vision emerges relentlessly and triumphantly from the many renditions of L.A. we have seen on film to give the city a thrillingly ambient beauty that seems almost otherworldly, and Cliff Martinez’s throbbing, Tangerine Dream-esque synth score makes the film seem like such a deeply felt retro throwback to the measured crime films of the 80s that it becomes positively new again. Few action films (or just films, for that matter), are more evocative; from each of Drive’s many inside-the-car POV shots, the lights outside flitter ominously, the engine revs, the dashboard gleams, and all the while we get the feeling that it all has weight, that it means something. For Refn, every frame is a force.
Drive is, in so many ways, the direct antithesis to what we have become conditioned to seeing when we go to big studio action movies. It is careful, calculated, and slow. The violence, when it comes, is unfetishized and meaningful, every shot has purpose, and every cut is fluid and sensible. It retains a thematic bluntness that is as evocative in its guardedness as it is refreshing in its simplicity, and it never sacrifices its pointed humanistic nuance in favor of a needlessly convoluted narrative. Drive is a symphony among cacophonies.
