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| Carey Mulligan and Ryan Gosling in Drive |
I wasn't surprised, in reading about Drive after I watched it, to find the film being compared to Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy of the 1960s. Both, of course, feature a protagonist with no name who has a slight oral fixation -- a cheroot in the case of Clint Eastwood in the Leone films, a toothpick in the case of Ryan Gosling in Nicolas Winding Refn's. And both are taciturn and impassive, Eastwood with his squint a little more consistently menacing than Gosling with his bland, unemotional mien. The difference is that Gosling makes us sense that there's something going on deep inside, behind that façade, but we won't really know what it is until he stomps a man to death in an elevator late in the film. With Eastwood it's more a matter of what you see is what you can expect to get. I admire the style with which Refn pulls off his story, with the occasional casting against type, as with Albert Brooks as a thug, and the effective use of actors who can play almost anything, namely, Bryan Cranston and Oscar Isaac. The risk of concentrating on style is that everything remains on the surface, and that's the real problem I have with Drive, that it feels superficial if occasionally witty, as in its use of pop songs to comment on the characters and action. The repetitions of "A Real Hero" are, I think, meant to be ironic: There's nothing especially heroic about Gosling's driver, except that he does what he does to help Carey Mulligan's Irene and her young son. But when he finally boils over into an act that amounts to overkill, she's forced to question his character. Still, the movie is a cut above most recent attempts at neo-noir.
