Ryan Gosling Drive
This film is being sold by the Hollywood marketing machine, as a slick Fast and Furious car chase movie. To look at the trailer you would expect explosions and automotive mayhem galore. The reality is quite different however. This is a dark brooding heist movie with Steve McQueen overtones that transcends movie marketing templates.
Getaway wheelman Gosling is the man with no name, more Pale Rider than Vin Diesel and the plot is paced like No Country for Old Men, rather than the turbocharged antics of the blockbuster Fast franchise.
Drive was adapted from James Sallis’ 2005 crime novel, by Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Hossein Amini. It won Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn the Best Director award at the Cannes film festival. Gosling chose Refn personally, after seeing such classics as the Pusher Trilogy and the truely deranged Bronson.
The artful cinematography comes courtesy of Newton Thomas Sigel. His atmospheric camera work makes the City of Los Angeles the voluptuous co-star of this movie, a brooding and unforgiving backdrop to a truly gripping crime story.
The plot concerns Gosling, a stuntman and part time getaway driver and the relationship he develops with his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son. When Irene’s husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) comes home from prison, he finds himself owing a debt he cannot repay. Gosling offers to help out and events quickly career out of control. A special Crimezine shout out also goes to the villainous Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) and Nino played by Ron ‘Hellboy’ Pearlman.
The film has several very violent scenes, that have come under the scrutiny of critics. Crimezine feels that cinema audiences have been soft soaped for too long. Violence has consequences. A fact that Drive bravely faces up to.
Crimezine saw the screening of this movie at Falbrook Laemlle theatre Los Angeles, just a few blocks from Reseda Boulevard where Gosling’s character works. At one point a local restaurant on Sherman Way is name checked in the movie Do you know where that is? asks the character, to which some one in the audience shouted out Yeah, and the food is terrible. How we laughed.
So if you want to see a movie that is too cool for school this weekend head out for a Drive and when people get hurt remember to duck for cover because the blood and gore spurts high and wide.
Crimezine 