There are two ways of looking at Drive, the recent Ryan Gosling noir. You can consider what happens on the screen—the plot, dialogue, and action, or you can consider what doesn’t happen—the many silences, distances, empty spaces, questions left unanswered, and motives left unclear. Which one you focus on will go a long way in determining how you feel about it.
What happens in Drive is not greatly distinguishable from what happens in countless other crime films, perhaps most directly Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978). The Kid (Gosling) is an inexpressive mechanic moonlighting as a movie stunt driver and, more importantly, a getaway driver. When he’s behind the wheel or in a fistfight, we can see exactly who he is: he’s a master, a man with ice in his veins and savagery in his heart. In every other way, he’s inscrutable, almost totally opaque. When he meets next-door neighbor Irene (Cary Mulligan), they fall easily, almost wordlessly in love, and they—along with Irene’s young son Benicio (Kaden Leos)—soon become inseparable. Then Irene’s husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), returns from prison and, in standard film noir fashion, the Kid finds himself drawn deep into the criminal underworld he’d previously only skirted.
In other words, if you judge by what’s happening you’re bound to be disappointed, because none of the plot is very original. Neither are the characters. Every one is an echo from another crime movie, an old noir, a thriller on cable at 3 a.m. One reviewer, panning Drive, asked: What kind of character wears a gold satin jacket embroidered on the back with a huge scorpion, like the one the Kid wears? The answer, of course, is a stock character, the kind Steve McQueen or Robert Mitchum used to play. And when the Kid, late in the film, asks mob boss Bernie (Albert Brooks, nicely cast against type), if he’s heard the story of the scorpion and the frog, it’s hard not to remember that that was already an old story when Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin brought it up in 1955. (“Let’s drink to character,” indeed.)
To understand the greatness of Drive you have to consider what’s not happening – its absences, the lulls and silences it creates and sustains. It’s the best, most stylish use of genre since Rian Johnson’s Brick (2005). Within a simple framework, endless variation is possible. But unlike Brick, which retooled noir’s conventions and threw them at us from unexpected directions, Drive’s innovation is in creating silences and spaces that beg to be filled with meaning.
Take, for example, the movie’s violence. To me it felt like a brutal film. In truth, its instances of violence are not only few, but notably brief. Why do they stand out so much? Because every burst of visceral bloodletting has some quiet, almost poetic moment as a counterpoint. Like the scene in the hotel: The Kid has agreed to help Standard rob a pawnshop to get him out of a debt to the mob, but of course it’s gone terribly wrong. Afterward, the Kid and a hapless cohort, Blanche (Christina Hendricks), are attacked very suddenly in a very small hotel room, where they’re holed up with the requisite duffel bag of cash. It’s true – the battle is gruesome, but what gives it weight is the long, long (I didn’t time it, but it had to have been close to a full minute) interlude immediately after the shootout, when a blood-spattered Gosling peers out from the bathroom where he’s just offed the last thug. There is no sound at all; director Nicolas Winding Refn simply holds it. It’s just us and the moment: slow, observant, begging to be filled with some sort of meaning, emotional or otherwise.
These quiet moments in the narrative have their corollary in the way the characters are developed—or, more to the point, aren’t developed. Time and again the script and performers lead us to moments where we expect to learn who they are and why they do what they do. But then everything stops short. Drinking a glass of water in Irene’s kitchen after he first meets her and gives her a lift home, the Kid answers her questions minimally. He doesn’t elaborate about himself and she doesn’t press him for information. It’s not the conversation we expect during the expositional period of a story. There’s a gap. This is a movie that understands how to use negative space, and how negative space creates—or at any rate encourages—meaning.
Drive also works to create space between the story and the viewer. It’s full of distancing artifice. At one point the Kid conceals his identity by wearing the rubber mask he wore stunt-driving in a movie, a facsimile of the face of the fake star of that fake movie within this fake story—layers on layers of pretending until we hardly know what we’re looking at or what we’re supposed to feel.
And there are constant instances of self-commentary. During the opening chase (a masterpiece of restraint, during which almost no actual chasing occurs), a radio plays a sports broadcast so generic we can’t even tell what sport it’s supposed to be—it becomes clear that the play-by-play isn’t about a game at all, but the chase we’re watching. In another scene, the Kid and Benicio sit watching a children’s TV show, and the Kid asks if a shark character is a bad guy. Of course, replies Benicio. He’s a shark. There aren’t any good guy sharks? asks the Kid. No, Benicio replies. Everyone knows sharks are all bad. The Kid isn’t talking about the show, of course. It’s an actor pretending to be a character, saying lines that are questions about that character.
But here, in these spaces, it’s hard not to project meaning. Gosling, as the Kid, is asking: Are all movie characters who are adept at killing other movies characters rotten, evil, irredeemable? Are we so totally defined by what we do that it’s synonymous with who we are? If so, then there’s nothing more to know about the characters than what we see on the screen. There’s no need to know where they came from or how they got the way they are. There’s just the movie, the character, and what he does.
The question for me, I guess, is whether it’s possible, as a viewer, to have a genuine emotional experience amidst all this artifice and emptiness, or whether, more fundamentally, the filmmakers even want us to. I think they do, maybe, and there are moments when feeling comes through. There’s this elevator scene, for example.
It’s the Kid and Irene in an elevator with a goon sent to kill the Kid. There’s a great deal of silence, and the Kid and the goon sneak peeks at each other. It’s tense. Then comes a lull. The Kid reaches back and gently nudges Irene into the corner of the elevator, away from what’s about to happen—not just the violence, but what it will reveal. Then, prolonging the moment, he leans back and kisses her. It’s a long, slow, silent kiss. It seems to last forever. And then the explosion of violence. In 15 seconds the Kid has dispatched the goon, stomping him to death in a mounting frenzy of bloodlust. The elevator reaches the garage and Irene—who knew nothing about why the goon was there—backs out. Her expression says it all: to her, the Kid is a monster. The Kid’s face is flushed and bloated with ebbing rage and fury, his eyes heavy and dull, spittle on his lips and blood sprayed across his jacket. In what’s perhaps a three-second shot with no dialogue, Gosling tells us more about the Kid than we learn in the whole rest of the movie. He conveys fury, shame, regret, compulsion, love, and a kind of helplessness. He looks like an animal caught devouring its prey. He looks captive to his own native traits—and those of every noir anti-hero that came before him—like that scorpion he and Mr. Arkadin like to talk about. He lets us peek behind the nothing to see the something.
At least, that’s what I think I saw while I was busy ignoring what was happening in favor of what wasn’t. Maybe it was just me. Maybe it’s just a movie doing what all movies do, only more honestly. Maybe it’s a savvy filmmaker and a brilliant actor who know that they just make the images; we make the meaning.
16 responses
you said it! brilliant review of one of the best films i’ve seen in ages. you captured exactly what i felt but couldn’t express. i hope that more people will see this genius bit of film making!
Guess I’m not a negative space kind of film-goer.
thanks for this wonderful review!
Incisive review. I wish the self-reflexive touches had been left out (of Drive). The film was so admirable for its purity of intent, and meta fixtures just say “smug” to me. One thing I think you missed is how those very sharp mood changes — benign to violent in a flash — might be purposeful. Is it douchey to say that’s a comment on the inherent polarities of storytelling (and especially filmmaking)? When Carey Mulligan’s character backs out of the elevator and stares agape, sure she’s seeing The Kid for who he really is, but it’s also a moment of crushing resignation: there is nothing outside this good-bad matrix. Those are just the parameters we’ve provisioned for ourselves with centuries and centuries of stories. She sees that.
Larry,
An excellent and insightful review of one of the best movies to come along in a while. Like you say, the open, quiet spaces, free of dialogue, are remarkable. My wife dubbed it “Park.” She meant that in a good way. -N
Huh, the open spaces in the dialogue drove me absolutely, postively, raving mad. I get and take your point about how they could also open up meaning, and they do, clearly, in the elevator scene. But the car scene when she comes to his shop? The first time he’s in her apartment? I just wanted to tear my hair out. It didn’t seem to add anything except awkwardness, which I guess is okay for it’s own sake if that’s how you roll, but it’s not my cup of tea.
Love the review. “…they just make the images; we make the meaning,” is a perfect assessment of not just movies, but art.
Thanks, all, for reading and commenting. @Daniel, interesting take, and I do think there was some commentary about the genre itself going on–of course, your perspective ups the self-reflexivity quotient considerably. @Nick, to your wife’s point, I had a line (eventually cut) to the effect that few movie posters capture their subject’s essence quite as well as the most circulated Drive poster, which shows Gosling just sitting there watching the rear view mirror. @Seth, fair enough. It’s not for everyone, and it isn’t surprising that for all its Cannes buzz, Drive has proven to be a little divisive.
Silence and space is a crucial element in noir, largely because no one is ever saying what they mean, and real communication tends to happen more often in glances or in the way someone walks out of a room or lowers themselves into a chair (or in the way a director shows a character doing one of these things). One of my problems with Drive is that this silence should not be a place for us to invent meaning; it’s where we should discover meaning where it is already hidden deep in the folds of the characters and plot, and a film that has created a rich world and populated it with characters of some depth will have plenty of discoveries to offer inside every silence. But perhaps the film wanted us to project our own meaning into each quiet hollow, which can work brilliantly… if the story/characters give us enough to bounce our perspectives off of to create something of any interest, otherwise we may as well be imagining our own story and saving ourselves the cost of a ticket. Drive offered a great deal of moodiness and reserved cool, but only in rare instances did either the performances or the writing offer me any hidden meaning to be found in that empty space. It was all just moodiness and cool.
And the thing is, I love moodiness and cool. And I would have loved to watch a movie full of nothing BUT moodiness and cool (Gosling could have easily been transplanted into just such a movie), but Drive was continually attempting to indicate depth and meaning where there was none, and what’s worse, audiences and critics seem to be inserting meaning into that empty space and then praising the director/writer for the brilliance of the film, the brilliance of NOT creating anything. Maybe it’s just me, but nothing that was happening in the movie (or anything that wasn’t happening) was particularly profound or moving. Not that I need a film to be either… if it’s really super moody and cool.
This brings me to my main issue with Drive. The opening scene was brilliant. It showed us a character doing what none of us could do. And then we were never able to enjoy this again. This ability that is supposed to define the character, against which he is to weigh his better judgement, ultimately played a very small role in the film (if you really think about it, his being a great driver wouldn’t make much difference either way after that first scene). The rest of the film was spent in moody silence… in a movie called Drive… about a getaway driver. I’m not asking that it be nothing more than an action film, but is there no room for a little more getting away in a movie about a getaway driver?
The thing about genre films is that we know the characters and the story, at least basically, so there’s no need to beat the audience over the head with the characters’ angst over the circumstances. It’s the details, the interpretations, the variations that make a good genre film, not laboring over the questions that every other film in the same genre has already dealt with.
I enjoyed Drive, and it was certainly well-made, and I will be on the lookout for more from this director, but I worry that those who rank it as one of the best films in years are layering brilliance on top of unspecific mediocrity, seeing indecision and imprecision and calling it intentional vagueness or purity. These people may very likely be more clever than the filmmakers, and their interpretation more interesting than the actual film. The author of this article’s discussion of the opening scene is a good example. While the radio broadcast heard during the scene did offer a bit of self-reference, it was primarily a plot device. The game is not unspecific. It is very specifically a Lakers game being played at Staples Center, which is where the kid goes at the end of the chase in order to ditch the car and hide himself within the crowd. It plays on the radio because he is timing everything perfectly. And had the rest of the film been as perfectly paced and cleverly designed as that opening scene, I too would be counting this film as one of the best in years.
My apologies for the lengthy comment. I’ve been reading glowing review after glowing review for Drive, and I finally had to take it all out on this article, which despite disagreeing with, I really enjoyed.
Jonathan, if you’re going to make your comments that thoughtful, even-handed and insightful, feel free to make them as lengthy as you like. I don’t even necessarily disagree with anything you’ve written here. On the subject of a film’s meaning, though, I can’t help but think of the murder of Roderigo in Welles’ Othello. Welles was praised for the innovation of staging it in a Turkish bath, until he revealed that he’d made the choice because he owed so much money to his costumer, who refused to deliver the clothes for the scene’s original staging. There’s a similar story about a shot in a Kurosawa film (I forget which one)–people debated the meaning in his choice to hold a particular static shot, but he explained that if he’d panned right or left a very modern looking factory would have been visible–a problem, since the movie was set in the 19th century. Point being, I’m always wary of saying any piece of art means anything in particular. Which is what I meant by my saying that maybe this movie is just more honest than most. None of that means it’s isn’t fun and enlightening to debate meaning, of course.
Anyway, great comment. Thanks for it, and for reading.
Thanks for the response, and I am in complete agreement with you about the danger of any work striving to be or mean precisely this or that, and of any criticism claiming a work means precisely this or that. Drive never wandered into dangerous territory where this is concerned, thankfully, but perhaps wandered too far toward the other extreme for my tastes.
The films you mention are wonderful examples of those magical accidents that can happen in any form of art making. Such great things can happen when you have a disparity between intention and interpretation. I was also reminded of the seemingly contradictory idea that restriction can lead to greater creative freedom, like the Dogma 95 philosophy that says following rules, even arbitrary ones, forces you to look for new ways around them. I think there is something like this at play with all genre films (or novels, for that matter). The genre, once established, has certain rules, and the fun of genre films is the ways in which they creatively work within those expectations or stretch beyond them.
@John:
I really like your final point on the genre films. I do have one question: In your penultimate comment, you wrote: “The opening scene was brilliant. It showed us a character doing what none of us could do. And then we were never able to enjoy this again.”
But correct me if I’m wrong, while the Kid escaped the police in the garage, I feel we are left to assume that the thieves in the back seat were captured by the police. No?
If so, the film opens with the fallibility of the Kid, a characteristic that remains throughout the film: The husband he voes to protect dies under his watch at the pawn shop, the girl-next-door, Irene, is not protected but traumatized by the elevator beating (she does not know the man nor understands his murderous motives), and in the end she refuses to leave with him for this very reason. I’m not really sure what to do with this movie either–I do know I enjoyed it–but I was curious if anyone else thought the Kid in this way: as the “cool”, get-away driver, that is neither very cool in the most important of moments, and never really “gets away”.
Oh yeah, great review, Larry.
Great review. I only disagree on a minor point. I thought that the play-by-play wasn’t that ambiguous and was obviously a Lakers basketball game with payoff of him making the escape in the Staples Center parking lot. There might have been some reference to the chase through the play-by-play, but I’d have to rewatch the film to see. For me I was just cognizant of how he was close to Staples Center and that the game was almost over, which perhaps isn’t easy to ascertain if you’re not familiar with the area. Again, great review.
@Brandon:
That’s an interesting take on it, and I suppose I can’t say for sure. My understanding of the scene was that, as the driver, he would get the criminals to a point of escape, such as a crowded garage, and then they were on their own, each going their separate ways from there, his job being done. That’s what I thought had happened, at least. But if you’re right, it would certainly change things.
Great review but you failed to mention the soundtrack which for me was as integral to my enjoyment of the film as any of the characters.
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