Drive – Nicolas Winding Refn, director, 2011
JOHN: There were noir themes worth exploring: the hero’s search for a father, loyalty to an attractive wife’s husband, saving a woman from evil, a man of honor walking the mean streets of LA and—best of all, from the opening sequence—the movies versus reality. Why this film chooses to not explore them is its real mystery. Acting (Ryan Gosling as Clint Eastwood and Carey Mulligan as Naiomi Watts), music, stylistic photography are all great, but Drive flies off the cliff into a blood-splattering abyss. Like Albert Brooks, it tries to reinvent itself (or reinvent noir), but ends up a shadow of what it should be.
GO (1 GO out of 4)
SPANKY: John, you’re showing your age. There are some terrific effects here: the superimposed images, overhead shots of Los Angles, the shadow on the parking lot when The Driver attacks Books and we don’t know who has gotten the better of the other, haunting music, moments of unspoken feeling between the lovers in a run-down apartment, the glimmer of a smile on Gosling’s deadpan face at sunrise after the bloody climax. The violence is over the top, but don’t blame this film for that; and I don’t think it is a substitute for plot, but an attempt to place the themes you mention in a contemporary context. Just because you live in Wisconsin, and not California, doesn’t mean you can’t move ahead. It ain’t the forties, my Sydney Greenstreet friend!
BARK, BARK, BARK (3 BARKS out of 4)
