Review of Drive (2011) by Kof-Drop — 21 Sep 2012

Drive is, in my opinion, the best film of the past couple of years. Better yet is that I wasn't expecting it... at all. With a title like Drive, and a pretty-boy star like Ryan Gosling (whom I had greatly underestimated until this film - poor judgment on my part), one would expect this to be a Hollywood blockbuster action movie with lots of cool chase scenes. Well it's not. In fact, there are only two chase scenes in the film, and while one is rather exciting and fits the standard bill, the other is a masterpiece. This chase opens the film, and it's not at all what you're expecting. It is slow, deliberate, and suspenseful; a driver attempts to avoid the police, on the moonlit streets of LA, not with speed and skill (though he does possess them), but with cunning. This scene sets the tone for the rest of the film: a cool, calculated, character-driven story, which doesn't say as much as it does - much like its protagonist.

Lack of a name and lack of words make the driver a very mysterious character. We get absolutely no sense of who he was, or how he arrived at his current situation - no time lost to an over-complicated backstory. In a way, we are offered more of a description of his character than most movies would provide, but only through his actions. Stanley Kubrick was a huge believer in the importance of watching a film. It is evident in 2001: A Space Odyssey (10/10 in my book) that he urges his audience to watch rather than listen. In case you haven't seen it, the very first dialogue occurs about 25 minutes into the film, and the rest is sparse to say the least. Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn does the same, telling most of his story through body language, facial expressions, and brilliant camera work.

Let me stop here and say that the cinematography in this film is among my favorite ever. This is possibly the most masterful aspect of the story: it unfolds so beautifully on screen.

Refn also displays some brilliant qualities of another director, and this claim may be a bit unexpected: it's Quentin Tarantino. I'll have to clarify what I mean here. The great majority of a Tarantino film like Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, or Inglourious Basterds is character development. Tarantino accomplishes this with very long and seemingly inconsequential dialogues. The rest of the movie is generally violent; by this I mean sudden, shocking, sometimes appalling violence. This effectively makes a Tarantino film very gritty, when in fact a huge portion of it is friendly dialogue about Big Macs in France, for example. The character development in Drive is very different, because it is so visual. But the rest of the movie is, like Tarantino's, extremely gritty. Folks, this is some of the most disturbing violence out there, because the realism is so great, and because the camera does not shy away. I'm not trying to say it's a gore fest. It's nothing like that, in fact. It's just so real that it hurts. I happen to think it is superb, but it definitely makes me cringe. I'm warning you right now that some of it may not be pleasant - but that's the point.

For a much more lengthy and in-depth review, see my blog at kofdrops.blogspot.com.