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Simple truth: this movie isn’t for everyone. Drive might sell itself as an action picture, but in reality it’s a dark, intensely dramatic thriller that moves oh so slowly towards its violent, action packed conclusion. It’s not for the faint of heart. I liked it a lot.
Ryan Gosling stars as Driver – his character never reveals his name – who divides his days between stunt driving for the movies and working in an auto repair shop. He’s really good with cars. Nights, he contracts himself out as a getaway driver, giving his criminal clients very specific parameters: If I drive for you…I give you a five-minute window, anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours no matter what. One minute before, one minute after….you’re on your own.
It’s not clear why Driver takes on this shadowy underworld work, when he has two daytime jobs and a very simple lifestyle. But he smolders – Ryan Gosling is good at smoldering – so it seems like there’s darkness to him, something dangerous. Driver isn’t much for sharing – this film is very sparing with dialogue, the screenplay must be unusually short – and even as he gets to know his charming neighbor (Carrie Mulligan, in an excellently nuanced performance) and her appealing son, there really isn’t much talking. They seem to understand each other instinctively, and long silences between them are pretty much the norm. It’s all very old fashioned, deliberately paced, noirish, with Irene and Driver trying to carve out a connection, a little bit of hope in the middle of the darkness.
But it can’t last; Irene’s husband Standard gets sprung from jail early, and he comes home with villains on his trail, demanding he do a job for them. Concerned for Irene, Driver gets involved, offering Standard’s criminal colleagues his usual deal – I give you a five-minute window – but this time things don’t go according to plan.
The last half hour of this film is startlingly violent. My companions were hiding their eyes. But it’s all very well done, and it’s not done for fun; as bad as the mayhem gets, the violence serves the story, not the other way around. And Driver doesn’t seek out trouble, he just tries to protect his loved ones from it.
Also starring Albert Brooks as a quietly terrifying bad guy, and Bryan Cranston as Driver’s unreliable friend and agent. Playing everywhere, had an okay opening weekend. B
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| FilmDistrict |
The big movie of the weekend (bigger than that, really, this film has a lot of buzz) is Drive, an action thriller featuring Ryan Gosling as a movie stunt driver who spends his off hours behind the wheel of criminal getaway cars. Carey Mulligan co-stars as a mother with dangerous ties to the underworld. This one gets excellent reviews and the Danish director, Nicolas Refn won the best director award at Cannes; the film was also nominated for the Palme d'Or, the grand prize at Cannes. But, in spite of these lofty credentials Drive is rated R for "brutal bloody violence"; it is not, apparently, for the faint of heart. Equally challenging, in a violent way, is Straw Dogs, a remake of a 1971 Pekinpah film. In this version James Marsden plays a Hollywood screenwriter who moves back to his wife's (Kate Bosworth) home town in the bayou to get her father's house ready for sale. Once there he manages to stir up some of the locals, notably his wife's old boyfriend, played menacingly by Alexander Skarsgard. Rated R for lots of nasty stuff; getting so-so reviews. Finally, for rom-com fans there is I Don't Know How She Does It, starring Sarah Jessica Parker as a high powered executive struggling with the challenges of motherhood. The best reviews of this one say it's like Sex and the City if Carrie had a baby -- but really, there aren't any good reviews of this one. These three (along with a new 3D version of The Lion King) will dominate screens this weekend, but you can still catch Contagion, or a leftover summer blockbuster like Rise of the Planet of the Apes. And if you are just looking for some lighthearted fun, go see Our Idiot Brother. It stars Paul Rudd as a sweet ne'er do well who hits a rough patch and needs to rely on his three sisters to help him through it. Still playing but likely to move out of theaters soon. Next week: Moneyball.
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| Warner Bros. |
If Mother Nature was one of those super villains who long to destroy the world, she might unleash a flu bug like the one that terrorizes humanity in Contagion. It’s a bat virus that hops onto a human host with deadly consequences; the hapless first victim has no natural immunity to the disease, but a remarkable ability to pass it on to other humans, who are equally good carriers, and we are off and running with a pandemic as horrifying as the Black Plague. Worse, because in the fourteenth century there were no packed airliners giving the virus efficient, free rides around the world.
The first patient, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), is a corporate executive who picks up the bug on a business trip to Hong Kong, and unwittingly spreads it through casinos and restaurants and bars and airports as she travels back home to Minneapolis. There’s a subtle cleverness to the way director Stephen Soderbergh shows how easily transmission is accomplished: we see Beth at an airport bar, waiting for a connecting flight; she fiddles with her glass, her hand toys with some nuts in a little bowl. She chats on a cell phone with a lover she has just left while she hands off her credit card to the bartender, who then taps information onto a grimy touch screen. All these ordinary little events feel ominous, even though Beth shows no sign of illness. Once she gets home, though, her health declines so rapidly that all the doctors treating her are completely baffled, and then more people get sick, and the movie pulls away from that story and takes us to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and the World Health Organization in Switzerland, where we start to follow the progress of the epidemic through the clinical eyes of scientists trying desperately to stop it.
This is a cracking good thriller, but it’s cold hearted; we are engaged by the mystery of the virus but we never care much about the characters who are affected by it. It’s almost like turning on the nightly news. But, it’s a pretty scary news show, watching scientists desperately try to piece together the viral puzzle while the world descends into anarchy around them. And it’s hard not feel a cold sinking feeling when, during a press conference, the best minds of the CDC keep saying, “We don’t know.”
But that’s the point here, this film is intended to scare us, Soderbergh makes sure of it, allowing the camera to linger on every surface a sick person touches, showing unknown hands clearing cans of food off a grocery store shelf, leaving us to wonder when or if it will ever get restocked. He’s attracted a host of fine actors, and they all do good work even though most of them have little screen time and not much character to develop. Matt Damon turns in a heartfelt performance as Beth Emhoff’s husband, trying to understand what has happened to his wife (“I was just talking to her!”) while he desperately fights to protect the rest of his family from the plague that somehow entered his house. Kate Winslet is also very affecting as the CDC doctor/researcher who goes to Minneapolis to assess the scope of the epidemic and attempt to control it. And, in a nod to viral communication, Jude Law plays a blogging conspiracy theorist who gets millions of hits when he announces that there is a simple herbal remedy for the disease. But the star of the show is the virus, that’s what we’re there to watch, and it never loses our attention. Playing everywhere, won the box office during a pretty slow movie going weekend. B
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