Gripping fare

The delightful, suspenseful thriller Drive is an absolute must for lovers of good cinema

Not in a long, long while have we come across such a visually satiating and thematically eloquent film as Drive, which not surprisingly walked away with the Cannes Best director prize for Danish Nicholas Winding Refn. It is about the hero with no name. What do you do, you ask him and he has a one syllable answer — drive. And the manner in which Refn shows him to us is indeed magical.

Closeups of the man at his steering wheel of his Chevy Impala, tooth-pick (not cigarette) in the side of his mouth in sunshine and moonlight driving along the "hundred thousand streets of Los Angeles" which he knows like the back of his hand.

It’s only after a while that we see all of Ryan Gosling, for he is the enigmatic hero and what a superb performance he puts in a film that shows how much can be achieved with minimum dialogue, exaggerated sound and bombastic music to break those long, long pauses.

Ryan Gosling (right) puts a superb performance

All we know about him in the establishing shots is that he works in a garage during the day and moonlights as a getaway driver — giving just five minutes, wrist watch strapped to the steering wheel, to his clients, not a minute less or more.

The damsel in distress is Irene (Carey Mulligan) living in the same hotel (room 408 to his 405) along with her nine-year-old boy. They first meet in the lift. From then, it is just glances, and it looks like the hero speaks little, which of course is an exaggeration. He first connects with the boy and then the mother, whose husband (Oscar Isaac) we later come to know is in jail. A few days later Standard, for that’s his name, is released and there’s a celebration in room 408. By then, our hero has made inroads into Irene’s psyche.

However, Standard has to get into a heist to pay his debts to the mafia and there are a whole lot of them. There’s Shanon (Bryan Cranston), the driver’s partner and garage owner Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks). Pizzeria owner Nino (Ron Perlman) also has a hand in the mess. Then there’s Blanche (Christina Hendricks) who makes a brief but telling appearance. But the violence could have been reduced, one did not want to see the many different ways of taking life.

Scriptwriter Hooseini Amini does an excellent job by resorting to minimal dialogue, which helps Rafn establish his style aided by Newton Thomas Siegel’s fluid camerawork where the subject will be on the right of the frame, leaving enough room for background. In one scene, you have Irene fixing her hair clip. In the next, the camera catches that same clip. It is a flow of action and the silence is eloquent. Guess that’s the difference between European and American cinema. It is film noir at its best.

If one has to find flaws, it is the middle which tends to drift for not more that a few minutes. And, of course, the ghastly doses of blood and gore. Otherwise, it is gripping fare from start to finish and one which almost rejects the beginning-middle-and-end theory and is even superior to Golden Palm winner Tree of Life. No praise is high enough for Ryan Gosling, who will soon become a leading star, and though Kate Mulligan tends to suffer by contrast, she is excellent in exercising restraint. The cameos by Albert Brooks, Ron Pearlman and, of course, Christina Hendricks stand out in this delightful, suspenseful thriller.

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