Film Review | Drive

Why hello again Mr Ryan Gosling! It hasn’t been that long since we last met – you had livened up the otherwise rote comedy-drama Crazy, Stupid, Love earlier this season, and I hear you’ll be back on our silver screens once again – to melt the hearts of the fairer sex and impress critics, I’m sure – with The Ides of March: that Clooney-led political drama that’s garnering up all sorts of award buzz.

But before that, Mr Gosling, we get to enjoy you take a trip down a darker path that’s closer to the kind of stuff you used to tackle before The Notebook came along. Yes, remember that period?

When you starred in films like The Believer (as a Jewish Nazi, no less) and Murder by Numbers (far from being head heart-throb, you were a callous, murdering psychopath!), only to be snatched up by the mainstream – rightly so, rightly so – and appropriated by screaming teenage girls everywhere.

And having just seen you in Nicolas Winding Refn’s stylish – yet brutally violent and uncompromisingly bleak – lone ranger crime drama Drive, I can safely say, without a hint of sarcasm: “it’s good to have you back”.

Because, not only is your performance as the taciturn, unnamed ‘Driver’ involving in and of itself, it also affirms that pretty boy actors don’t have to be consigned to rom coms and meathead stud roles.

Oh, and you’re better at it than Di Caprio too. If anything, your blank-faced approach in this 80s pastiche affirms that less is more… while your reformed heart-throb colleague grimaces, frowns and strains to bring the drama across while Daddy Scorcese makes sure he hits all the right notes.

But enough.

Refn, the Danish director responsible for the critically acclaimed ‘Pusher’ trilogy – depicting Copenhagen’s drug underworld – has found the perfect leading man in Ryan Gosling who, in this adaptation of the James Sallis novel of the same name, plays a stunt driver who moonlights as a ‘criminal assistant’ driver of sorts for whichever criminal will pay.

His catchphrase is that he doesn’t wait around, he doesn’t ask questions… he drives, whatever the circumstance, be it bank robbery or murder scene.

Things get complicated for this seemingly smooth-running lifestyle when our protagonist falls for an inmate’s wife (Carey Mulligan). When her husband (Oscar Isaac) returns from the inside, he has debts to settle, and after the Driver finds him bloodied and bruised on the floor, he makes the mistake of helping him out.

Now irrevocably embroiled in the workings of a powerful gangster (Albert Finney) and his merciless right hand man (Ron Pearlman), the Driver must step out of the sidelines and fight his way through a murky underworld… all the while trying to latch on to his humanity and the promise of newfound love.

This is a film that could easily slip into total kitsch. And for some people, I’m sure it does. While Gosling keeps it minimal to the core – deliberately channelling the equally tombstone-faced anti-heroes of the Charles Bronson ilk – the cocktail of sleek, though darkened visuals, slow-motion pans and heady atmospheric music (once again, channelling a synth-rich 80s sheen) definitely comes as an assault to the senses, and might not be appreciated by all.

This is, of course, saying nothing about the equally unrestrained violence. Bullets are hammered onto heads, and feet are applied with an equally aggressive relish.

But if you’re not squeamish, and if you can take stylistic excesses with a pinch of salt, Drive is a veritable feast, that might easily sustain repeat viewings.

Now, whether Notebook fans can stomach it is another story entirely…