“Drive” (2011)

“Drive” is a film buff’s film.  Any punters craving wall-to-wall car chases, over-the-top CGI effects and a happy ending should check their mainstream expectations at the theatre door or, better still, not attend at all.   It’s an exercise in style, a throw back to not one but at least three different movie-making eras, a neo noir that bears all the hallmarks of 1970s existential road movies and the early work of Michael Mann a decade later.  In other words, it’s pretty damn cool.

Ryan Gosling gives his most minimalist performance to date in the title role, an unnamed mechanic and part-time Hollywood stunt man who moonlights as a getaway driver.  Taking no organisational role in the stick-ups themselves, he’s a hired hand with a private code of behaviour that goes beyond mere professionalism.  Beholden to his loser boss Shannon - both the facilitator of the getaway gigs and his would-be manager in a planned tilt at the professional racing circuit - the driver is otherwise a classic loner.

Romance disrupts his measured existence.   Or rather, the possibility of romance and domestic normality.  A couple of chance encounters with a neighbour in his apartment building - the cute-as-a-button Carey Mulligan - lead to unexpected friendship and the surrogate parenting of the woman’s young son.  When her husband is released from prison, however, the driver’s loyalty to her extends to helping the ex-con do one last job.

“Drive” begins with a riveting set-piece heist and never lets up on the tension.  Slowly but impeccably paced, it’s punctuated with old school car chases  that are unsullied by digital silliness or any over-the-top stunt work.  Danish born director Nicolas Winding Refn demonstrates considerable formal skill in the execution of both these and the shoot-outs and fights.  The brutality of the  violence is matched only by the understated emotion of the love scenes.  In someways “Drive” is a text book example of an action film that thinks nothing of spilling gallons of blood but declines to offer up so much as a nipple.  One protracted kiss aside, it is chaste work.

Gosling’s underplaying is counterbalanced by the showy but never cliched villainy of Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman.  Brooks’ deliciously sarcastic delivery and unexpected physical menace has never been so effectively harnessed.  Perlman is just plain hideous, if oddly sympathetic in one scene which taps into his vulnerable side, reminding the audience that the guy did play Hell Boy.

“Drive” might fail to move you in the way that a quality drama does or otherwise create a sense of empathy for its characters.  It’s quality genre film making, the contemporary equivalent of classic film noir, and as such operates within strict emotional parameters.  For those sufficiently savvy to understand and love its cinematic antecedents, it’s a joyous watch.