What Drive Means to Us
Michael Mann’s Thief is one of my all-time favorite movies with James Caan delivering one of the coolest characters I have ever seen on screen. It’s a vibe that has been extremely rare after the turn of the century but somehow Nicholas Winding Refn pulled it off. He was able to capture the slick neon nature that harkens back to some neo-noirs from the 70s and 80s. Plus there is the kick-ass soundtrack that blends synths and retro ambient sounds. Most notably ‘Nightcall’ by Kavinsky and ‘A Real Hero’ by College that transported me back to the good old 80s vibe. Lastly, there is Ryan Gosling as the quiet badass driver. He’s mysterious and sexy who feels like he could explode into a violent rage at any moment but you wouldn’t know by his cool demeanor. Plus that bomber jacket is fucking rad.
–Vincent Kane
I saw Drive in college, and honestly, it took my breath away. The violence in it is intense only because it’s so intimate, and the story feels grounded with its characters and its setting. Ryan Gosling doesn’t say much because frankly, he doesn’t really need to. So much is communicated through glances, expressions, and tender moments. It’s a work of art, from a director with a distinct and interesting style. I enjoy it more every time I watch it.
–Valerie Morreale
Entertaining and Provocative
It’s easy to rewatch entertaining movies. I can stumble upon Batman Begins or The Perfect Weapon and regardless of the mood I’m in, I’m probably gonna get sucked in and watch the whole movie. Entertainment has that ability to transport you somewhere no matter what your present circumstances are. It’s this singular quality that made me fall in love with movies in the first place.
There are also movies that are reaching for something beyond entertainment. A movie like Under the Skin may not have as much broad appeal as something like Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but what it lacks in pure entertainment value it more than makes up for in impact. T2 is a wild ride that is over before we know it, leaving us ready to watch it again and again. We might not want to rewatch Under the Skin often, but the movie will stick with us for days and even months afterwards.
To accomplish either of these things is difficult to do. Making movies is hard. You get one little thing wrong and the whole film will be ignored by audiences and then quickly forgotten. But to be entertaining and provocative is practically unheard of. As I sit here and write this, only a few movies come to mind that have achieved this: No Country for Old Men, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, Fight Club, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 neo-noir, Drive.
Why Drive is Entertaining
Drive drops us right into the action. There’s not really any build up except for a few cryptic words muttered by Ryan Gosling. And before we really know what’s going on, we’re in the middle of a car chase. Gosling is The Driver. He’s the strong, silent type. He wears jeans and a satin jacket with a scorpion embroidered on the back. He keeps a toothpick in his mouth at all times. He’s got ground rules. You want to work with him, you get a five minute window. Anything happens in that five minute window and he’s yours. A minute on either side of that five minutes, and you are on your own.
The Driver is dangerous, but he’s not reckless. He lives his life within a set of tight parameters. Even when he’s driving, he’s not taking any risks that haven’t been calculated. The Driver is exciting and mysterious, and Gosling’s performance pushes the character beyond the quiet, reluctant-to-get-involved antihero we’ve seen a thousand times and shapes him into something more complex and interesting.
So the Driver lives his ordered little life. By day he’s a mechanic at Shannon’s (Bryan Cranston) garage. By night, he’s the getaway man for stick up artists. In between he works as a stunt driver (also for Cranston’s Shannon) in the movies. But when he meets neighbor Irene (played by Carey Mulligan), the Driver’s neat life gets suddenly messy.
The plot is pretty simple. Irene’s old man Standard (Oscar Isaac) is fresh out of prison. He wants to settle back into his life. But there’s tension there. We don’t know how long he’s been gone, but his and Irene’s is no marriage of passion, that much is clear. Pretty soon, Standard’s prison past comes back to haunt him and he’s faced with an ultimatum: Pull one last job or his family will be killed. The Driver feels some sense of responsibility toward Irene and her young son Benicio after developing a bond with them while Standard was still in prison, and he offers to help Standard pull off the job.
But of course things go south, and the Driver is left trying to set things right while protecting Irene and Benicio.
Ryan Gosling’s performance would have been enough to carry this film. He’s mesmerizing as the Driver. Despite having few lines, Gosling manages to convey more about the character in the pauses between lines, with an upturned corner of his mouth, or a raised eyebrow than he does through anything the character says.
But Gosling isn’t an outlier. In fact, there’s not a performance in this movie that I wouldn’t describe as above average. Even the child actor Kaden Leos is completely convincing in the role of Benicio. Carey Mulligan, who I’ve never really thought much about, is captivating as Irene. Again, with few lines, Mulligan manages to convey things about the character that are not made explicit in the script. Irene is weary. We get the sense that she never meant for her life to end up this way. There’s a sadness about her, and she seems resigned to her fate, but she’s not expecting pity for it. She’s not the tired strong woman trope that so many movies offer up as an ideal, but she’s strong nevertheless. She bears her lot in life with dignity. And despite the sadness there, there’s also warmth. Mulligan could melt a block of arctic ice with her deep brown eyes and just the hint of a smile that we see a couple of times in the movie (mostly when the Driver is interacting with Benicio).
Bryan Cranston plays the hapless Shannon perfectly. We 100% buy that he is a perpetually unlucky but optimistic dreamer. When he’s on screen, Cranston ceases to exist and all that remains is the down-on-his-luck but ever-scheming Shannon. Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, Christina Hendricks, and Oscar Isaac round out the supporting cast with near perfect performances. There’s not a performance by an actor in this movie that doesn’t ring true or that takes you out of the movie.
And if the plot, characters, performances, and action weren’t enough to entertain us, every other aspect of this movie from the searing synth pop soundtrack to the cinematography are synthesized together to create a movie that is so compelling and, despite some graphic violence, is so easy to watch that its hour and forty minute runtime feels more like a half hour.
Why Drive is Provocative
Drive is a violent movie. There are a few scenes that are difficult to watch. I wanted to shield my eyes during the elevator scene, and I never do that. I didn’t. But I wanted to. This movie pushed some boundaries in the regard, and it drew criticism for it.
But that’s sort of the low hanging fruit. Drive isn’t just about good guys versus bad guys. It’s not just about the plot. Who’s gonna get away with the money in the end? Will the Driver get the girl? Will good and justice prevail? Will he get revenge on the powerful who pull the Driver and Standard’s strings as though they are puppets?
We want to know the answers to all of these questions. And they keep us wondering right up to the end. Hell, beyond the end. Which is partly what makes Drive provocative.
At the end of the movie, the Driver drives off into the night. He’s got a knife wound to the belly, and he’s left a duffle of cash in a parking lot. Where does he end up? Does he live or die? What happens to Irene and Benicio?
We wonder all of these things, but Drive denies us answers. We’re forced to think about them long after the credits roll. Why didn’t the good guy get the girl? Which leads to another question: Was the Driver a good guy? At various times throughout the movie the electronic pop song “A Real Hero” (a collab between College and Electric Youth) plays over the action taking place on screen. The refrain “And you have proved to be a real human being and a real hero” is repeated over and over again.
The easiest way to interpret this is to think of it as an affirmation of the Driver as a hero. The character sets aside his tidy life to make room for Irene, Benicio, and Standard. But ultimately his involvement with them tears his neat little world asunder. He loses everything he has and possibly pays the ultimate price. We don’t know if the character lives, but it is strongly suggested that the knife wound is fatal.
So he’s a hero, right?
Well, he becomes a hero. To Irene and Benicio at least. But does that make him one of the good guys? What is a good guy? I think this is a question Drive wants us to consider.
Cranston’s Shannon tells Irene “He’s a good guy”, but it’s not clear that Shannon knows much about the Driver beyond his usefulness to him. Another scene has the Driver and Benicio sitting on the couch in Irene’s apartment watching TV while Irene gets ready. We can’t see what they’re watching, but the Driver asks “Is he a bad guy?” Benicio says he is. Driver asks how he knows, and the kid says he’s a shark. Driver asks if there’s no good sharks. The kid says “Look at him. Does he look like a good guy?” The camera lingers on Gosling’s face as his character considers this question.
Gosling looks the part. He’s handsome. He’s charming in a kind of awkward way. Good with his hands. Good with kids. He’s kind and gentle with Irene. He’s a good employee to Shannon. He might as well be a knight in shining armor. Just swap the armor for denim and the Driver fits the bill.
But the Driver has a dark side. A violent side. And it’s not the kind of violence that is just the necessary, survival kind. Our would-be hero, The Driver, loses himself in the violence. He becomes someone else. Eventually Irene sees it, and we see it as well. And we wonder again who the Driver really is. What’s his story? What dark secrets is he hiding? And, ultimately, is he one of the good guys?
Drive doesn’t answer any of these questions. Of course there are hints. The movie ends with the refrain from “A Real Hero” repeating again and again as the Driver drives off into the night. Maybe he’s transcended whatever demons haunt his past. Maybe he redeems himself with his act of selflessness. But the movie doesn’t give us the answer. We have to decide for ourselves.
Hollywood Connections
Beyond whatever is going on literally with the plot of Drive, I think this movie is largely about the movie business. There are lots of clues. The Driver and his boss Shannon work as stunt men in the movies. Albert Brooks’s low level mob boss Bernie Rose tells the Driver that he met Shannon in the movie business. He tells the driver he used to be a producer. “Kinda like action films, sexy stuff.” Shannon coordinated the car sequences for him, Rose tells the Driver. A few times the Driver and Benicio sit together on the couch and watch TV, possibly a movie. Because Drive was shot in and around LA, there are also several visual references to Hollywood movies sprinkled throughout. Probably the most obvious one is the scene where the Driver takes Irene and Benicio for a ride along the concrete LA river.
Why is this worth mentioning?
The plot of Drive deals with a character (the Driver) going through a metamorphosis in order to redeem himself and become a real human being. But in order to make that transition, he has to give up his old life, he has to give up who he once was. In the final act of the film, the Driver dons the latex bust from one of the movies he works on. He pretends to be someone else in order to become someone else. Which is what actors do, sometimes off screen as well as on screen.
And Driver’s not the only character floating between identities. Shannon is a loser, but he wants to be a winner. So he puts on a smile, pumps himself up, and eats shit from mobsters in order to get ahead, to become someone else. Bernie Rose is a movie producer turned mobster. He commits a couple of different acts of violence in the movie, but it’s not clear that he enjoys it. In fact, I would argue he does it despite his distaste for it. Maybe he has to become someone violent in order to commit these acts when really what he wants is to be a legitimate business man.
Ron Perlman’s Nino complains that the east coast mafia call him a Jewish slur to his face and treat him like a child. In the film, Nino is half Italian and half Jewish. He wants to be treated the way any other Italian mobster is treated–as part of the family. But he’s not. He’s an outsider pretending to be something he’s not.
I can’t tell you what it’s like to work in Hollywood. But I have a pretty close friend that became successful in the movie business, and for a window of time after he’d made it, he became someone else. Or from my perspective, was pretending to be someone else. I went to visit him once while he was filming a movie, and we went out for drinks with cast members and other people connected to him or the movie. While we were waiting in line to get in to some bar, my wife and I struck up a conversation with the people in front of us. Eventually they asked us what we did for a living. When we told them, they seemed relieved and said “That explains it.” “Explains what?” we asked. “Why you’re so real.” We didn’t get it, but they explained that they assumed we were industry types. And industry types, they said, always have an angle they are playing. We weren’t guarded or pretending to be someone else to get something out of them.
Man, I never forgot that experience. But I think it speaks to some of what director Nicolas Winding Refn is trying to hint at in Drive. The movie business is an attractive industry. So many people want to work in it. But it’s a business built largely on dreams and fantasy. It’s a false front with nothing much inside, but it needs you to believe that it’s real for the illusion to work. And that can be a beautiful thing. But the beauty is only so many steps removed from crime and violence. Because wherever there are dreams, there are people willing to exploit them for their own benefit.
And we see this with the intermingling of the criminal enterprises of Rose, Shannon, and the Driver and their connections to Hollywood. Hell, the city itself is a fantasy. LA is a desert pretending to be an oasis. The characters in Drive seek refuge in that oasis, but refuge isn’t to be had for most of them. Which is also sadly the case for most of those who go to Hollywood looking to make their dreams real and find only a mirage instead.
What are your thoughts on Drive? Let us know in the comments!
