Monday Movie Review: Drive
Okay, so it's actually Tuesday. I'm still catching up from last week, and I did watch this movie last night, with Ash, but we didn't finish it until 11:30 or something and I was tired.
Basically, it was awesome.
Peter Travers at Rolling Stone named it the best movie of 2011, saying, "Screw Oscar, which will surely ignore Drive because it's too bloody, too creative, too ambitious and too polarizing to comfort audiences." I'm not going to disagree with him; this might be the best movie I've seen in a year.
It's highly stylized, with a late 80s electro-synth soundtrack and lots of long, silent shots of Ryan Gosling as the names, strong, silent hero. There's also a showdown late in the movie on a beach that reminded me of the climax of a Hitchcock movie, with it's larger-than-life backdrop, shifting shadosws, and operatic staging.
It's also, as Travers notes, very bloody, and as Roger Ebert pointed out, all the color in this movie is with the many villains, while Gosling is basically a blank slate. This creates a lot of tension for us in the audience, as we're looking throughout the movie for any clues to Gosling's character. There are hints that while he seems simple enough, he's full of contradictions: street-hardened, but with the personal sensibilities of a child. These hints come more through the movie's visual style than they do through the plot or the dialogue: there's a scene where Gosling drives his love interest (Carey Mulligan) and her young son through the LA River. The film is slowed down, their faces are overlit, and it's laid over an upbeat synth song.
Speaking of the villains: while Gosling does a terrific job, this movie is absolutey held up by the performances of its supporting actors: Ron Perlman, Bryan Cranston and an evil Albert Brooks. I never thought Brooks was that funny, so to see him succeed at not-being-funny-at-all was impressive. And is there a male actor alive who chews the scenery better than Perlman?
Ash had seen it once already, so I felt free to make many of these comments while we were watching it. A lot. I'm not sure I'll be invited back for movie night again.
