4 ouf of 5 Popcorn Kernels
There are movies about an occupation - and there are movies about the lives that surround an occupation. Drive is like (and his is a compliment), a low-grade Quinten Tarintino movie, that he may have made his first year in college). It starts off in neutral, and takes you all the way to 3rd Gear.
Drive stars Ryan Gosling, as simply the Driver - who is a driver of many sorts: he works part time as a stunt driver for movies, he also works in his friend Shannon's (Bryan Cranston) garage fixing cars, he moonlights as a get-a-way driver-for-hire; where he helps criminals get from point A to point B after a heist.
His life is complicated, and gets even more so in two ways: Shannon has more schemes that Ron Popeil, and decides to ask his longtime friend Bernie (Alber Brooks in an amazing role) - a mob boss - for a loan to buy a Nascar racer (guess who he also sells on the idea of driving it). The Driver is always down for a few extra bucks, and accepts the idea.
Complication #2 arrives early in the movie, when Driver meets his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) at a grocery store, as her car has stalled there. He decides to DRIVE her home, and fix her car. Over time they bond (as well as her 5year old son), despite the fact that her jailed husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) is soon to be released. Upon release, they meet, and the hidden words they share at a dinner table with all of them present, is riveting.
Standard however, is forced to go back into a crime pattern he had before his imprisonment, and needs a driver (guess who).
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| It's A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood |
I will stop there.
The plot, the characters, their occupations, begin to then unfold over on each other - then they soon all lead back to the Driver, and what he can eventually do for each of them...some things go right, but as it happens, things begin to go horribly wrong.
And the Driver turns into something quite unexpected.
Ryan Gosling proves his acting chops (once again) and his calm but deadly demeanor is reminiscent of the early days of Christian Slater or Antonio Banderas. I first saw Ryan in Blue Valentine (reviewed here), and I was taken aback. I also have to give kudos to Albert Brooks as Bernie, which is a character we sympathize with, but one who turns out not to be so nice. I always considered Ablert Brooks as a dad who speaks volumes of wisdom, but whose voice is so slow that you are forced into an act of immense patience just waiting for those words to come out.
This film delves into the underbelly of Los Angeles, and it is filmed beautifully by Nicolas Winding Refn. The son and father Oscar Isaac, are the only minorities seen in this world, and it is okay - this movie is truly a one-man-show, and this type of underground seediness of mob-bosses, gangsters, and shysters is truly a world that has never really been one occupied by many people of color. Oscar has been in many films (Sucker Punch, The Nativity Story), and his Cuban background lends for him to infuse into roles that belie his heritage. Unfortunately, as with many minority roles, the weight of tragedy falls heavily on this character, and he relies on a non-white to rescue him (oh, the ways of Hollywood). But this film was never meant to be one that ends in a morality tale, for Ryans character himself is more of an anti-hero, and his only redeeming factor is that he is paid for what he does (but in Hollywood, the character that bonds with a child (or animal), are actually the hero's in the movie) and he is paid, in a sense, for his actions.
There is unexpected violence in this movie, and like a Cohen Brother's film, it is not overpowering, but it does move the story along, but shuts down any romantic/ nurturing plot set up in the beginning of the film. It turns from melodrama straight into an action/adventure and keeps that pace till the end. If the end could have been the middle, it would have been a much better film. But as it stands, it moves, and moves, and moves...and never never leaving you parked for long.
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