drive: controlled doses of morphine

*SPOILER ALERT*

Drive: (2011. dir: Nicolas Winding Refn) Drive is ridiculously seductive, nearly impossible to resist, even if you sit there cognizant of the dishonesty lurking at its heart while you watch, even then, resistance is very nearly futile. It begins well, with good lines, an enigmatic, slowly emerging and engaging situation, and with an early nod to Vanishing Point.

Its style is so flawlessly smooth and unimpeachable and cool and jazzy that one doesn't even notice the flaws in story or short-comings of character development; one floats easily along in the effortless current Winding Refn provides.

Its palette is Teal-and-Orange, that omnipresent pairing of puke-colors which seems to be irrestible to production designers these days. (Read about the hideousness here, and join the resistance.) This is, in fact, the Teal-and-Orangest movie I've ever seen, and we've all seen a lot lately, haven't we? It's an absolutely shameless color design, almost to the point of inspiring sardonic admiration, a downright fascistically duo-chromatic piece.

Although this director is relatively new to Hollywood, Drive seems to be full of Hollywood in-jokes, such as the presence of a skilled and savage killer who began as a movie producer. Certainly the scene in which the Driver stages an act of brutality in a room encircled by naked, impassive women must be some kind of in-joke, particularly the lingering shot of a deadly hammer held quivering at his hip-level so that it seems to hover in front of a naked breast. Either it's funny or it's some graphic-novel shade of misogynist nutso (see Vampires review for further rant, below).

It is a great pleasure to see Albert Brooks again, finally manifesting the full complement of humor and darkness which has always played just underneath his facade, and Bryan Cranston is fantastic as the Driver's wrecked and doomed mentor. A lesser actress than Carey Mulligan might have been disastrous in the girl-role, but the girl-role is unworthy of Carey Mulligan.

Part of the impeccable style rises up from short-cut scenes, which leave you with an Impression, while avoiding any messy descent into emotional depth. This style is made entirely of perfectly-deployed and cool distancing devices, in fact, which is what makes such a horrifically violent film so sugary-sweet to swallow. In one of only three or four scenes in which we actually witness a conversation of any emotional depth, this one between the Driver and the long-time mentor who has unwittingly betrayed him, a sort of "I coulda-been-a-contender" moment, Winding Refn lifts us in and out of it, cutting away and back, very gently dropping us out of the scene and back into it so that we... well, so we don't get too upset. So we don't get too emotionally involved. He uses audio in the same way, uses it like a great master, sometimes to build tension, as in the scene where the sound of a stopwatch ticking in silence becomes very nearly unbearable. Mostly, though, he uses it like exact dosages of morphine, so that (for instance) a well-placed, hypnotic song lifts you just far enough above an ugliness that you are untroubled by it.

The film "feels" a little like Soderbergh's hypnotic the Limey and a little like 2010's the American, that George Clooney euro-esque existenz-noir, both of which were probably inspired by le Samourai and those old existential gems from the '60s. I prefer the American to this, largely because it was not so exquisitely controlled, and both the script and the actors were given some room to breathe and move around, with questions raised and left hanging, allowing the coldness of space between characters a very palpable influence.

Still, if you're going to exert iron-fisted control, do it with the mastery that Winding Refn does here. There's a shot, an absurd shot, really, but so brazen I cannot resist it: the Driver has just taken his full plunge into the violence which will subsume him by killing two thugs who have been sent to a motel room to take him out. In the silence amidst the carnage afterwards, his face gore-slimed, he looks around a corner for an extended moment, then slowly backs into the shadow, then around so he disappears, inch by inch, behind the door jamb. It is an absurdly obvious visual metaphor, yet, as is so much of this film, almost euphorically enjoyable.

Winding Refn's last film, Valhalla Rising, seduced me utterly, largely with its use of music and sound, and also, of course, with the ineffable Mads Mikkelsen. In that film, I bought the violence: it seemed he caught the physical heaviness of brutality without flinching but also without overemphasizing it. Drive is a horse of s different color, its exploding heads and gratuitous acts of cruelty pushed to cartoonish extremes, which in itself is a distancing device of another stripe. If you convince us to laugh at the violence, we will not feel its brunt.