At some point, Ryan Gosling became a heartthrob for meme-makers everywhere. It’s not hard to see why. He’s a handsome man who gives off a sensitive side in many of his movies, and he’s a likable enough screen presence. He’s also a fairly strong actor who seems to be smart about the roles he chooses. It’s unlikely you’d see him anytime soon in the lead role for any sort of standard action movie.
That may be why the movie Drive seemed to disappoint moviegoers on release. It did look like a somewhat standard action/crime movie, but it’s a bit more than that. If anything, it’s just not the typical Hollywood version of that story.
Gosling stars as a nameless young man generally known as the Driver. By day, he does stunt driving for the movies. By night, he’s an ace getaway driver for local criminal types. By all indications, he’s a very quiet man who keeps his thoughts and feelings to himself, even as his friend Shannon (Bryan Cranston) uses the Driver’s general skills as a selling point to sell a car to local mobster Bernie (Albert Brooks).
But something happens when the Driver meets his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her young son Bencio (Kaden Leos). He and Irene start to develop feelings, and he gets something of a protective feeling for young Bencio. Those feelings don’t exactly go away when Carey’s husband Standard (Oscar Isaac), but Standard has some problems with some organized crime types, and the Driver agrees to help him out in a one-time-only-move that goes really, really bad.
But the Driver isn’t a man who takes things lying down, and once he gets angry, he doesn’t exactly calm down too easily either.
It is easy to see why Drive might not have been what a lot of moviegoers were looking for. Beyond an ambiguous ending that the movie is somewhat known for, it relies mostly on Gosling’s largely silent performance. The Driver isn’t one to talk any more than he has to, and even when the movie ends, we really don’t know much about the guy. His omnipresent jacket shows a scorpion on the back, and there is a reference to the story about the frog and the scorpion who cross a river together, suggesting that whatever it is that pushes the Driver and many of the other characters forward is their nature. None of them can, deep down, change what they are, and everyone of the adult men in this movie is a scorpion waiting to strike when the next victim least expects it.
I think it says something that when the Driver violently confronts the low level guy who set Standard up, delivering a horrifying beating to the man in the middle of a stripper club’s dressing room, few of the women observing the action seem to react much at all. A handful scramble out of the way when he comes in. The rest just passively watch him nearly kill a guy.
Then again, this is a movie where violence, when it comes, comes swift and suddenly. There’s almost a cartoon-level of blood in this movie, but again, only in the scenes featuring violence which isn’t all that many of them as most of the movie tries to get a bead on the Driver and his interior life. Gosling does a great job showing a man who is essentially unknowable. Some events from his past made him the way he is, probably, or at the least that he’s always been that way. Is the Driver interested in being a better person? It looks like he wants to be for the sake of Irene and Bencio, but he likewise doesn’t seem to be capable of being that person because, deep down, he’s just another scorpion.
So, check this one out (currently on Netflix) as long as you understand this is more about one man perhaps trying not to be what he deep down is, and not the standard sort of Hollywood action/crime/revenge movie that it may appear to be from the outside.
Grade: A-
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