Please Drive

I saw that!

I would say this movie has the best pre-opening-credits-sequence-followed-by-opening-credits that I have seen in quite some time.

Ryan Gosling plays a guy with no name who just drives. He’s just really good at driving cars. He drives for a crime getaway and it is just a very exciting, well-done sequence. The music is great (actually the music is great during the whole film), the cinematography is great, the performance is great, the car driving is great, the car sound effects are great. My now-dead ex-boyfriend Tony would have had a thing or two to say about the roaring of that engine, that’s for sure. He also would have known what kind of car Ryan Gosling mostly drove in the film, which I don’t.

Then the opening credits, which are like 80’s bad romance Twin Peaks or something! I wish there was a youtube of it! But here’s the cover of the soundtrack–that’s the font! Oh man it’s hard to explain–I guess this is why I don’t write for the New Yorker. “God, I wish you could SEE it!”

After this wonderful opening, we are treated to like 65 minutes of Ryan Gosling playing basically an autistic person, “wooing” (meaning: “staring mutely at”) Carey Mulligan, who is a single mother who likes him for some reason and is not at all concerned that he is obviously a serial killer (she is pretty dumb (he’s not technically a serial killer (yet))). He’s not a person, he’s a Driver, and that’s it. This movie is about him groping toward some sort of humanity and making kind of a hash of it. He feels like he’s in love but he doesn’t know what that means, because he’s not really a person, he’s just this weird good-driving robot, so he ends up creeping everybody out and getting his cool scorpion jacket all covered with blood.

Albert Brooks plays one of the villains in this film. Ron Perlman plays the other. They are both gross. There is a scene I really want to talk about with you but it would be major spoilage. It involves Bryan Cranston, who is just a terrific actor.

I got bored in a good way, but my viewing partner was captivated throughout. He felt the film was brilliant. I felt it had brilliant elements and a brilliant opening but kind of devolved into revenge-fantasy-with-stupid-girl-bloodbath territory. Then again, after discussing it at home, I may have come around a bit, as I am easily led by the passions of others.*

The one criticism I still stand by is–and I am not making a joke–I REALLY could’ve used more driving in the movie.

There is literally not enough driving. If you see the opening you’ll understand. That opening is NEVER TO RETURN, and that’s kind of sad. Not like I need it to just be a bunch of car chases, but really, Ryan Gosling carrying Carey Mulligan’s grocery bags around silently? Couldn’t we shave like 15 minutes off that stuff and get another killer getaway drive in there? I sound like a Philistine but IT’S TRUE

The thing is, if you’re not really a human person but you’re trying to be, you’ll make a lot of weird calls. You won’t totally get that it’s not a mark in your favor as a boyfriend when you randomly stomp a man’s skull to death in an elevator (spoiler, sorry), or that it’s maybe KIND OF WEIRD to invite a total stranger to just drive around in silence with you for hours. Is Carey Mulligan falling for him or is she just anthropologically fascinated? Even that is hard to tell, which is admittedly awesome and a better reading of their “love” “story” than my knee-jerk “ugh” reaction. “She did not love him!” screeched my old man, “she was fascinated by him and liked that he knew how to fix her car!”

Christina Hendricks is in this movie for a way too short amount of time. It’s so weird to see those people (meaning: the cast of Mad Men) wearing contemporary clothing and/or smiling (note: she does not smile in this film).

There is a lot of surprising gore, all at once, in the final act. There is a cool scorpion jacket. There are razor blades. There are roaring engines. There is Ryan Gosling’s face. There is a very catchy song that will get stuck in your head but is creepy. There is also a scene involving Ryan Gosling wearing a fake rubber full-head-and-shoulders mask that he wears in his capacity as a film stuntman, and that is terrifying, and that helps us to understand the whole deal where he’s not a real human.

This film was made by Nicolas Winding Refn, who I feel like I discovered by accident and am now pretty fascinated by. He made the culty Pusher movies, which for me are pretty whatever, but then he made BRONSON and after Bronson he made VALHALLA RISING. In my memory nobody talked much about Valhalla Rising but it is PHENOMENALLY GOOD, it’s like everything you wanted The New World to be, times ten, with none of the dumb stuff (and I kind of liked the New World!). Also way more macho (meaning: I don’t think there is a single woman in it, and certainly no Pocahontas, who was a truly wonderful badass), which I realize isn’t a good thing but I’m not made of stone.

Valhalla Rising is also about a nearly mute, basically autistic, but unbelievably competent and physically badass man who, for reasons totally unexplained, takes a strange shine to a young boy and protects him against terrible evils at the expense of his own bodily well-being. The same as Drive! Except with Vikings! It’s about the Vikings going to America and being like “where the fuck are we, are we in Hell,” and then all dying.

There are maybe six lines of dialogue in the entire film, and it’s all crazy CGI’d or something to the max, it feels like what I imagine being on mushrooms feels like. In my memory I sat unmoving on the couch with my jaw hanging open and just kind of floated delicately in my own inner ear for the duration of this film. It is the slowest, coldest, ugliest movie, and yet riveting and compelling and beautiful.

Drive has a lot of those characteristics, but not nearly as much hallucinatory tripping (and not nearly so many crushed skulls–Drive has 1, Valhalla Rising has, I don’t know, 97?).

Bronson is like, what the fuck even is that movie? I loved it so much. Also about a socially dysfunctional but physically competent man who is super violent. But Bronson is all zaniness and Clockwork-Orange like wacky editing and weird interstitial scenes where the character of Bronson addresses an audience from onstage, wearing thick pancake makeup and doing a variety of mime-type routines.

Also a great film.

So anyway, if you’re mildly fascinated by the last 2 films of Nicolas Winding Refn, you should go see Drive and report back. A bunch of people hate Drive with the fiery burning passion of a thousand dying suns, which is always interesting, so why not go for it?

*not true