I did not know Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn before Drive, winner of the Best Director Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and recipient of considerable critical claim. Refn’s credits as writer and director rather improbably include the TV movie Miss Marple: Nemesis alongside the films Pusher, Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands, Pusher III: I’m the Angel of Death, and Valhalla Rising. After viewing Drive and reading about his other work, I would say it takes something of an imaginative leap to picture Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple in Refn’s hands.

Drive is more than a bit violent and bloody for more taste, yet compelling. Ryan Gosling’s stoic protagonist is a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver. Refn sees the taciturn, preternaturally cool driver as a mythic, fairy-tale hero, a knight in shining armor who saves the damsel in distress. This archetypal figure is grafted onto the existentialist antihero of classic noir who lives not so much outside legal and moral conventions as oblivious to them. Not that he is nihilistic. Far from it, he is bound by a strict moral code and sense of right and wrong that lie beyond articulation.

There is a woman, Irene (Carey Mulligan, whom you may recall from Lone Scherfig’s fine 2009 film An Education). Their paths cross by chance, mutual attraction communicated by shy glances and gestures. There are complications in the form of a young son and an imprisoned husband. When the husband returns home after release from prison, he senses there is something between his wife and her friend. He is bothered by this but lets it go beause he wants to put his criminal past behind him and make a life for himself and his family. In classic noir fashion, the past’s grip is not easily shaken, leaving the two men bound together on a doomed course undertaken because it is the only way they can see to protect the woman they both love.

To say the driver has a dark side is insufficient. There is something more than dark, something deeply bad and wrong, in the excess of violence coldly exhibited, without frenzy or fury, beyond any need of the moment. Thus Refn and Gosling collaborate to make the driver repulsive as well as appealing, for he is both. Contrast him with Lisbeth Salander in Steig Larsson’s trilogy about the girl with the dragon tattoo. No less capable of extreme violence than the driver, Lisbeth does horrible things to very bad people who would inflict as bad or worse on her if they could, and in some instances have done so. Though there were moments I cringed when reading or watching those scenes, I found myself cheering, albeit with something of a guilty conscience, as Lisbeth meted out a brutal justice. I felt nothing like that when the driver stomped the man in the elevator, however clear the man’s bad intent toward the driver and Irene. Is Lisbeth more simpatico because she is a woman brutalized and abused by men from childhood? Or it more that Larsson provides a backstory to give us a sense of why Lisbeth is as she is, it humanizes  her, while Refn’s driver remains a cipher, a mystery, not a realized individual for whom we might feel sympathy if we had a sense of the source of that capacity for violence within him.

The supporting cast is exceptional. Bryan Cranston (Hal in the television series Malcolm in the Middle) demonstrates again what a fine actor he is in a supporting role as Shannon, a mechanic and low-level hustler who perhaps sees himself as something of a mentor to the driver. As given to jittery chatter as the driver is silent, Shannon sets the tone early as he jabbers about a getaway car he’s prepared. “You look tired, kid,” he says to the driver. “Can I get you anything? Benzedrine, Dexedrine, nicotine…oh, that’s right, you don’t smoke.” Mulligan as the femme, Oscar Isaac the husband, Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks the hoodlums, are equally up to the task. Brooks in particular has been singled out, deservedly, for his performance.

In the end I do not know that I would recommend Driver, certainly not without reservation and caveat, and I feel no inclination to see it again. Yet Refn’s film is compelling enough for me to anticipate checking out at least one screening in the series Driven: The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn, on the NW Film Center calendar for March.

Interviews with Nicolas Winding Refn

:: Jan.16.2012 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »