Drive (2011)

Ryan Gosling, showing about as much emotion as he ever will in this film.

Those of you who know me fairly well may not be startled to learn that I have something of an affinity for dark, depressing movies.  I don't think that this is a function of my personality or outlook so much as the fact that I really appreciate the grittiness of some films.  To me, these sorts of films come off with an honesty, a reality that we are sometimes afraid to confront in our daily lives.  We all want to live in a romantic comedy, but most of us face an uphill fight each time we swing our legs out of bed.  In some ways, tough movies remind us that the bad times could always be worse; no one's come after me a la Anton Chigurh recently.  But in other ways, I wonder if these movies are freed of some of the narrative constraints that so afflict even the great comedies.  More on that presently, but lest we forget, also, it is worth noting the words of my film studies professor, "Comedies are simply tragedies that haven't ended yet."  Cheery stuff.

I suppose the first question worth posing is, what limits do comedies have?  Well, for starters, we need to think of what comedy is.  Like with most things, I like to start on a theoretical level first and work towards the literal, so put Drive on hold for a moment.  Consider for a moment what many people consider to be the world's first comedy, The Odyssey by Homer (by the same token, we can think of The Iliad as the first tragedy).  This is a book replete with death, violence, sex, death, shipwrecks, trips to Hades, and more death.  I mean, holy crap, this book is bloody.  So how can it be a comedy?  Well, the fact of the matter is that the classical comedy (loosely) means simply that the ending is happy for the protagonist (even if that protagonist is kind of a dick, as is the case with Odysseus).  I'm not totally sure when this changed, but we can trace this type of classical comedy through literature into the post-modern era.  How many of you have read Kafka?  If you were reading The Metamorphosis, well, then, you know what I mean.  So this idea is certainly not dead.  But somewhere in the tradition of American cinema (and yes, I think this is largely an American phenomenon, although certainly we do not hold exclusive rights).  I don't want to go through the whole history of comedy (maybe I'll write up The Philadelphia Story one of these days, and I can tackle it then), but suffice it to say that I think the most notable adaptation comedies have made in the past century is perceptive: we think of comedies in an entirely self-contained manner.  Contrast this with Odysseus's plight; as those familiar with the story are well aware, the hero's journey does not end with his nostos to Ithaka - he must set out on foot with an oar, until he finds someone who does not recognize it.  (This is fast becoming a ridiculous tangent.  I promise this is going somewhere.)  You remember what my film professor said?  Yeah, keep that in mind.

So why is this a problem for comedy film?  Well... time limits are an issue.  Film has traditionally coalesced near the two-hour guideline, slightly less for most new comedy.  I'm not 100% sure why this is, but I doubt very much that it is incidental - consider that the films of the 1910s and 1920s tended to be either rather short, as with Battleship Potemkin and Chaplin's films, or insufferably long, as with Intolerance (look it up, people, I'm not summarizing that shit).  Essentially, that means that we have developed a cultural expectation that a comedy will wrap up neat and tidy, all things will be happy for the main character(s) now and forever, and we don't have to consider the long-term effects of the film's sjuzhet.  This isn't a bad thing, necessarily - consider The Hangover, a film which was sadly overlooked for Oscar contention.  How many of you honestly left the theater thinking, "Man!  They sure did a lot of damage to that hotel room!  And Ed Helms totally paid with a credit card!  They're going to get arrested again!"  No.  You're a liar.  You didn't think that.  And yet, it's a totally logical reaction, given the movie.  But the truth is, we just don't think about things like that.  It's just not the expectation we have, especially when a movie is goofy.  We expect the story to be over in two hours.  This is what I will call a "modern comedy."

So what is the obverse?  I tend to place non-"modern comedy" flicks in three categories: dramas, documentaries, and art films.  Original, I know, but give me a break, here; I'm trying to classify 110 years of movies into three categories.  Obviously, it's not going to be perfect.  Most dramatic films are clearly one or the another (Warhol really didn't do "drama" all that well, and James Cameron really hasn't exploited his artsy side so much as his money-grubbing side), although I do think many great films straddle that line fairly effectively.  Think of Citizen Kane - an ironic tragedy, sure, but also an artistic statement (especially for its era).  2001: A Space Odyssey is probably the zenith of this blending.  And I think that most cinephiles would agree there - the great movies tend to incorporate a strong measure of art (advice: pay attention to Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction at the Oscars, then watch all of the films that are nominated).

So I'm going to do something really revolutionary here: I'm going to split dramas into two categories.  Tragedies and Comedies.  "But what?" I hear you say.  "We already have comedies as its own category!"  To you I say: some men just want to watch the world burn.  Also, do you remember that whole diatribe about The Odyssey?  Yeah, that wasn't an accident.  I think what we've started to do as a culture is to confuse the classical comedy with the traditional tragedy, because what we now think of as a comedy didn't exist in 1500 B.C.E. (times were tougher then) and what we usually call "Drama" they would call "Hilarious," at least in comparison to their terrible, non-indoor-plumbing-filled lives.  (Years later, the Romans would invent indoor plumbing... with lead.  Making it possibly a step backwards.  Then they scrapped theater and just threw people to the lions.  So... yikes.)  Wowza, so if that's their comedy (and yes, I have read Aristophanes, and that's like Hellenic slapstic, but I'm generalizing here), what was their tragedy like?  Spoiler alert: EVERYONE DIED.  But no, seriously.

Whew, almost there.  Almost to the actual discussion of the film.  But first let's look back over the Best Picture winners since 1990 (totally arbitrary cutoff line) and classify them, just so we have a bit clearer image of what I mean by comedy and tragedy, and explanations when I had some questions (or if I haven't seen them - don't judge me, I watch a crapload of movies, but I haven't seen everything):
1990 - Dances With Wolves - Haven't seen it, Costner is a terrible actor, but not as bad as Nicolas Cage.
1991 - The Silence of the Lambs - Comedy; no real winner but the principles are alive and well at the end.
1992 - Unforgiven - I could make a good case either way.
1993 - Schindler's List - I'm saying comedy, with reservations.  Obviously, the setting is tragic.
1994 - Forrest Gump - Still one of the biggest mistakes the Academy has ever made.  Travesty, but no tragedy.
1995 - Braveheart - Haven't seen it.
1996 - The English Patient - Haven't seen it.
1997 - Titanic - I'll call it a tragedy, but it's mostly a tragedy that this won best picture.
1998 - Shakespeare In Love - Another huge mistake.  Comedy.  Fifth-best movie that was nominated that year.
1999 - American Beauty - The first real tragedy on this list.
2000 - Gladiator - Tragedy-ish, but God, do I hate Russell Crowe's acting.  Weak year for film (truth; check the nominees).
2001 - A Beautiful Mind - Comedy.  About schizophrenia!  Ha!  Ha!  (Shut up, Ben!)  YOU SHALL PERISH.
2002 - Chicago - Comedy, and just not a good movie.  Certainly not "Best."
2003 - The Return of the King - Comedy.
2004 - Million Dollar Baby - Tragedy.
2005 - Crash - Comedy (sort of) and the third-best movie nominated that year.
2006 - The Departed - Hmm... I'm going tragedy.
2007 - No Country For Old Men - The purest tragedy on this list.
2008 - Slumdog Millionaire - Comedy, third-best film nominated that year.
2009 - The Hurt Locker - Haven't seen it.
2010 - The King's Speech - Haven't seen it.
2011 - The Artist - Uh, comedy.

That was a lengthy definition, but you get my point here: the genre of movies we tend to embrace is not actually what we think it is.  We like to laugh and we like our movies to have a happy ending (modern comedies and dramatic comedies).  It turns out that not that many people seem to like irredeemable tragedy, so we redefine it: dramatic comedies usurp the title of "drama," and tragedies are increasingly relegated to the realm of "art films," where, with a few exceptions, they simply don't belong.  You doubt me?  Find someone who dislikes No Country for Old Men or A History of Violence and ask them why they feel that way.  Notice how their argument might be couched in the rhetoric of bad art criticism: "I just didn't get it" or "It was too 'out there'" or "What was the point of that movie?"

But once in a while we come across a film that really does blur the line between a drama and art for art's sake.  It's a rarity in American cinema, I concede.  But it is with this in mind that I (finally) come to Drive, as I believe it is in that rarest of categories, the true hybrid of tragedy and art.  This really is a difficult film to wrap my head around, and I confess that it's taken me almost a month to write this review because I didn't even know if I liked it or didn't like it.

And with that, if you don't want spoilers, stop reading, immediately.

Drive is an incredibly violent film.  Let's just get that out there to begin with.  It very well might be the most violent movie I have ever seen.  Now, what distinguishes Drive from other violent films, I believe, is that the violence truly is not gratuitous.  By that I do not mean that the director, Nicolas Refn, could not have chosen to mitigate the on-screen impact of the violence; he certainly could have.  But when I say that Drive is as much performance art as it is film, I grant it the authority to manipulate my emotions.  What impressed me about the violence in Drive is that my reactions to it universally mirrored what one or more of the characters felt about it.  For instance, take the scene where the Driver (Ryan Gosling) and Irene (Carey Mulligan) share an elevator with a hitman.  This turns into one of the most violent scenes in the film, punctuated by the Driver killing the would-be assassin by, quite graphically, stomping his face in.  I was horrified, watching it.  And so was Irene, and I think at that moment (a little more than halfway through the film) both principal characters understood that their story, at least together, could have no happy ending.  That's the plot of it.  The art of it is that both have incredibly powerful emotional reactions, and that we empathize with both, although they are wildly different.  Irene feels repulsion and a shattering of her (relative) innocence; the Driver (although he is harder to read) seems to feel a horrifyingly alone.  His is a life of desperate isolation, and as he symbolically loses Irene by saving her life, that is brutally, poignantly apparent.

I like to draw comparisons between films in this blog, because I hope that it might help my readers find great films that are similar to things they may enjoy.  I think the best I can do in this case is to reference The French Connection.  Both are films that are completely dominated by plot, but I think where Drive is a tragedy, The French Connection is probably a comedy.  And really the biggest difference is that with The French Connection, I feel like there's no "there" there.  It's a gripping plot, but nothing more; as critic Roger Ebert points out, none of the characters really have much depth at all.  Drive, however, has nothing but strong, well-rounded characters, and so we can connect with it at a much more visceral level, and our interaction with it provides, I think, a much more difficult yet rewarding experience.

No matter what else I say about Drive, it won't do it justice.  I don't know if I liked it, I don't know if I enjoyed it, but I will say this: Drive is an incredibly beautiful, terrible film.  It is gripping and powerful film.  And yes, it is violent.  If you can handle it, and if you're willing to sit and stew over it as hard as I have for the past month, I guarantee it will be worth it.  What a haunting experience.  Some of you will hate it, and that's fine.  But then I just ask you to try to figure out why.  And think about your culture, as well.  I think we like our movies happy-go-lucky, and this is the antithesis.