If I didn’t know from the credits that it was adapted from a novel by James Sallis, I would have sworn that Drive was inspired by an 18-rated video game. It certainly plays out like one. The hero, the unnamed Driver (Ryan Gosling), is a getaway wheelman with a code. “I give you five minutes. Anything in that time is yours. Anything outside it, you’re on your own.” In other words, don’t spend too long shooting up the place. He has an exit plan even before he gets in the car, demonstrated in the opening sequence when a basketball game followed on television shares his attention in the car along with the police frequency until he blends in with departing crowds after time is called. The Driver doesn’t say much. He exchanges looks with a single mom, Irene (Carey Mulligan), who lives two doors down and engages with her and her young son Benicio (Kaden Leos) only through the parameters of his vehicle – OK, he offers the boy a toothpick, but that’s the exception. By day, he works as a mechanic, drives for the movies and has ambitions – expressed by his boss, Shannon (Bryan Cranston), not himself – of driving a rally car. This brings him into contact with a pair of gangsters (Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman) from the school of Hollywood mismatches in casting.
There is a slow build-up as the Driver waits to be thrust into action. This occurs when Irene’s husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), is released from jail. You expect him to square off with the Driver. They exchange meaningful looks, Gosling adopts the performance tic of always pausing before his face responds and then speaks – the acting equivalent of checking your rear view mirror. But they’re both cool. Not so Standard’s gangster acquaintances who force him to do a job – one that goes down badly. As for the Driver, he’s there to help.
So far, so close to genre conventions. But it is all in the telling. When a gunshot explodes, it practically rips out of the screen through you. The Driver illustrates his not-so politically correct side with the lookout moll (Christina Hendricks). When the bad guys come for him, he fights back.
To say that the film is extremely violent by modern standards feels like an understatement. Hard men always say they’ll smash someone’s head in, but outside of the horror genre, we rarely see it. We do so here. The justification is pure genre pleasure. Yet there is a strange aesthetic honesty in showing really nasty violence that it is messy and disproportionate to the actions that preceded it. You feel that violence should shock and appal rather than operate within clean confines.
In spite of Drive’s dubious gender politics – women are depicted as powerless onlookers – there is a certain satisfaction in seeing the old tropes played out with the inference that a hero is redeemed by the fight he chooses and is destined only to live behind the wheel. Michael Mann meets exploitation – what’s not to like?
For those of us who frequented art-house cinemas in the 1980s and ’90s, it seems strange to see the British Film Institute logo preface a generic thriller rather than a film by Derek Jarman or Peter Greenaway. However, the BFI has succeeded the UK Film Council in dispensing grants to aid the distribution of British films in this country. In the case of A Lonely Place to Die, I should say a Scottish film with an Australian star (Melissa George) about a kidnapped 10-year-old Serbian girl.
The aforementioned moppet, Anna (Holly Aird), is discovered screaming through an air hole buried deep in a forest somewhere in the Scottish Highlands by a quintet of climbers. Once dug out, she attacks them – there’s gratitude for you. The plan is for an advance party consisting of Alison (George) and the other only half-decent climber to get to the police quickly by tackling a particularly precarious rock face. The remaining trio take the slow route with Anna.
Wouldn’t you know it – the advance party is followed. Alison’s friend’s rope is cut and, in the film’s best sequence, she is left hanging on a cliff face without rope while rocks fall perilously close to her. In the film’s only “I didn’t see that coming” sequence, the two kidnappers trade their knives for rifles and take pot shots at the other climbers.
Co-written and directed by Julian Gilbey, the film is competent, suspenseful and moderately diverting. It has an implausibly high body count and a finale that owes something to any number of films that intercut bloodshed with a ceremony.
