Ryan Gosling plays The Driver and if that name doesn't manage to explain his entire nature, then the short prepared speech he recites to potential criminal cohorts finishes the job. Even when people ask him what he does, he simply replies "I drive" and other party has to ask follow-up questions to figure out exactly what that means. Why does he have no name? Is he like The Man With No Name? Yeah kinda, but he's also like The Driver from the 1978 Walter Hill movie The Driver, although in that movie everybody had archetypal names like that, but in this film, only Ryan Gosling carries that particular anonymity.
To hear his mentor Shannon, wonderfully played by an alternately warm and bitter Bryan Cranston, explain The Driver's nature, you would believe that he simply appeared from out of thin air. Is he a force of nature? In one key scene, he is framed opposite the pounding surf as mirror images of raw unstoppable power. Is he a platonic form? Well, he is called The Driver and that's pretty much all he want to do. Is he God? Is he a god? Maybe he's Superman.
Gosling's performance is appropriately bizarre. He probably says no more than 200 words in the movie if you don't count his repeated speech about being a getaway driver. When he watches cartoons with a young child, they talk like equals, and it suggests a child-like center underneath his inscrutable shell. When he gets home from a job, he drops his bags and surveys his spartan apartment for all of 2 seconds before heading back out the door. Where's he going? To drive of course. Nowhere in particular it would seem.
The Driver might share some other similarities with Western heroes because he has a code of honor but also one of solitude and when he breaks that code he's forced into terrible actions. In this case, The Driver helps Shannon with an equal parts hare-brained and half-assed scheme to partner with wannabe mobsters to buy a stock car. More significant however, is the bond he forms with his neighbor Irene, played as sweet but conflicted by Carey Mulligan, and her young son Benicio played by some child actor who doesn't fall into all the annoying traps of more 'Hollywood' child actors. Irene's imprisoned husband is named Standard Gabriel and although he and his wife acknowledged how unusual his name is we never end up getting an explanation of it's origin; Standard is played by Oscar Isaac who was also in Rape: The Motion Picture earlier this year.
Albert Brooks plays Bernie Rose, a former movie producer and current crime lord who pulls most of the strings of the plot. He is an unusual choice for the heavy and you can't really imagine audiences afraid of him. Well, at least not until they've seen him here. He doesn't get angry, only frustrated, and even when people are dying, he gently reassures them "It's okay, it's okay, it's done, it's over now" before literally washing the blood off his hands. A bulldog would have been wrong for the part. Besides, the wannabe bulldog is Ron Perlman, who calls himself Nino and expects his underlings to address him as such but is called Izzie by Brooks in one scene.
LA doesn't usually look like this on film. Maybe because the director is foreign, and the city isn't old news to him. Even the establishing shots, just some helicopter sweeps of buildings at night, make the city look ten times more beautiful than most American made films. Cliff Martinez just did great work scoring Contagion but he outdoes himself here with music so strange and yet so perfect. The music contributes to the general time-warp feeling this movie has, where you almost think it's the 1980's until you see the cellphones and modern cars. Just look the title font. Talk about stylish.
There's a theme at work in the film, related to it's Hollywood setting and Hollywood-adjacent storyline, about people trying to be what they're not and running into trouble. The Driver acts like a surrogate father to the family next door but eventually the father returns, the movie producer wants to be a mobster but is in over his head and terrified of the real mobsters, his partner in crime wants to be Italian but the real Italians still call him a "kike" to his face, The Driver's mentor wants to be a big shot alongside criminals that view him as disposable, and we even have time for somebody to name-check but not fully explain the story of The Scorpion and The Frog.
This movie is weird, but when you see enough movies you start to hope that they'll all be weird, just so you won't know what's going to happen. A moody tone-poem with fits of hyper-violence might not sound like a good time but there's enough levity and humor (particularly from Cranston) to keep it from being a somber bummer-fest. In fact, I heard an interview with Cranston where he described the film perfectly: "It's a ride."
~ Director Nicholas Winding Refn previously made Bronson and Valhalla Rising both of which I highly recommend.
~ Screenwriter Hossein Amini adapts James Sallis's novel.
~ Learn more about the amazing Cliff Martinez score from Allison at Film School Rejects.
~ Brooks has a great line describing the movies he used to produce that sounds like a subtle joke about the very film you're watching.
~ Russ Tamblyn appears very briefly, still riding the high of his part as Riff in 1960's West Side Story.
~ Cable TV superstars assemble! Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad, Ron Perlman from Sons Of Anarchy, and Christina Hendricks of Mad Men appear in supporting roles.
~ The opening pre-credits scene is dynamite. You could cut it off from the rest of the movie and use it to pitch the greatest cable TV series ever that would never get made.
~ Hugh Jackman gets a special thanks in the end credits because he was the original lead attached to the project. Ryan Gosling replaced him and was allowed to select the director he'd like to work with.
~ "If I drive for you, you give me a time and a place. I give you a five-minute window, anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours no matter what. I don't sit in while you're running it down; I don't carry a gun... I drive." - The Driver
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