Flick Flak: Drive
Drive
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
With: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan
18, 100mins
‘The coolest film of the year’ is how this film has been described and cool it might well be. However, having heard a lot of excellent reviews before going to see Drive, I have to admit I was disappointed. It had some brilliant scenes, and I understand that it was aiming to be an art film coupled with B-movie sensibilities, but for me the bursts of extreme violence utterly detracted from the film.
Winding Refn’s last film, Bronson, was very much a case of style over substance and to an extent I would say the same about Drive. It is undeniably stylish, with the combination of music, cinematography and script adding up to some very cool moments. Case in point, the opening sequence, in which the driver (Ryan Gosling) acts as a getaway man for two armed robbers. With ice-cold detachment he evades the police, not with speed but with intelligence and calculation, all to some slick music and shot superbly from inside the car, which serves to heighten the tension when we see the police looking for ‘us’.
But for each awesome scene there is one which stands out for being ridiculously violent, so much so that it’s almost comic and completely ruining the gritty noir mood. The last film I saw before this one was Kill List, which had similar graphic outbursts, but in that film they were deeply unsettling. It was a source of huge frustration that Drive balanced out some wonderful scenes with these travesties.
I seem to be a little lonely in my opinion that the character of Driver was a little dull. I know Ryan Gosling is a brilliant actor but I didn’t feel he really pulled off the charisma of the ‘strong, silent type’ archetype. There were some nice moments in which his refusal to make small talk left gaping, awkward silences between he and Carey Mulligan’s Irene, but often it felt a little like the script writer was afraid to give the character more dialogue in case it betrayed his image.
All in all I was disappointed with this film. Maybe because I’d listened to a lot of hype, maybe because I’m a little sick of films trying to resurrect B-movie ideas (I thought Machete was awful, but for some reason I still love Planet Terror… I couldn’t tell you why). But I saw Drive as a collection of beautifully shot, well-acted, nicely scored scenes, irritatingly interrupted by violence which completely took away from the tension which builds really well on a number of occasions. I want to like Ryan Gosling… role on The Ides of March.
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