There’s an article up at Salon titled “The “Drive” backlash: Too violent, too arty or both?”. In it, Thomas Rogers and Andrew O’Hehir try to figure out why the recent Ryan Gosling crime movie Drive is beloved by critics while regular people “hate it”. First of all, audiences hardly hate the film; it’s got an 8.4 on IMDb and an audience rating of 79% on Rotten Tomatoes. But there is a notable discrepancy between the latter number and the 93% it’s got from critics. As their title indicates, Rogers and O’Hehir basically decide that the movie is too arty for the violence crowd, too violent for fans of The Notebook, and generally pitched more at critics than at normal multiplex patrons:
So here we are once again thrown back on the fact that people who watch hundreds of films a year, generally speaking, develop different tastes and different expectations from people who see a small fraction of that number. Vincent Canby of the New York Times said this years ago: You can’t watch 350 films a year and not become a specialist, of some kind.
That’s one way of putting it, but it misses the crucial point that Drive isn’t a great movie. It isn’t a bad or terrible one either, in fact, it’s pretty good. Gosling gets most of the screen time and pulls off a slightly goofy part with aplomb. The supporting cast is a murderer’s row of excellent not-quite-stars, with Carey Mulligan, Christina Hendricks, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, Oscar Isaac, and Bryan Cranston all breathing at least some life into comparatively small or even tiny roles. Its opening scene sucks you right in to an enjoyable story, it’s saturated with beautiful shots of Los Angeles, and the ending, often the trickiest part of a movie, works well with everything that precedes it.
But among all its good parts it has a few too many problems with plot, style and overall seriousness. In particular, the seriousness sinks it in a couple of places. Movies that are having a little bit of fun, with the audience and with themselves, can get away with some twists and turns where you say to yourself “Wait, that doesn’t make any sense”. Movies that are relentlessly serious, that demand your concentration at all times, can’t. And Drive is nothing if not serious.
More than anything else, a few too many of those “Wait, huh?” moments are why Drive falls well short of being a great movie. Perhaps the best place to start is with a short scene in an elevator that O’Hehir singles out for its brilliance in his gushing review:
“Drive” builds extraordinary tension before exploding in brief outbursts of shocking violence, almost in the mode of a samurai film. There’s one sequence shot in an elevator, which takes the movie from love story to violent revenge thriller within a few seconds, that film students will be deconstructing, shot by shot, for years to come.
That’s one way to describe it, but even film students should have better things to do with their time than deconstruct, shot by shot as it were, a strangely lighted piece of nonsense like the brief scene in the elevator. The setup is fairly simple: the hero, the girl and the henchman are all in the elevator together. As per film custom, the girl is ignorant of the danger she’s in while the hero plays it cool. The hero notices the gun discretely tucked into the henchman’s jacket, ushers the girl to the corner, kisses her, and then brutally beats the henchman to death.
The problem with all of this is that the henchman has been deliberately sent there to find and kill Gosling. (The movie itself makes much of this in a subsequent scene.) Yet this nameless bad guy doesn’t react when he finds his prey in a hallway, leaves himself totally vulnerable while sharing an elevator with a dangerous man he’s been sent to murder, and doesn’t notice when Gosling clearly prepares for fisticuffs by shepherding the girl to the relative safety of the corner of the elevator. He just stands there, waiting patiently to get his ass kicked. The scene is neither tense nor dramatic because the only thing this guy is threatening is the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Even by movie henchman standards he’s dumb and incompetent, so when Gosling finally does get around to stomping him to death it feels like a formality. It’s an enjoyably violent formality, to be sure, but it’s the furthest thing from a cinematic masterpiece.
Scenes like this occur with some regularity throughout the movie. At one point, Gosling goes to a strip club to confront a low level criminal that has just double crossed him. Gosling breaks into the dressing room, crushes the man’s hand with a hammer, and threatens to kill him if he doesn’t reveal who he’s working for. Around this bloody confrontation a dozen topless strippers sit mute and unresponsive. It makes for a memorable image, contrasting beauty and violence as well as sex and death in ways lots of film students could expound upon, but it also doesn’t make half a lick of sense. None of the women so much as flee or cower when a hammer wielding stranger breaks into a private room and attacks their boss. You’d think at least one of them would be worried that this completely unknown lunatic might hurt her as well, even if only inadvertently, but instead they all pose like placid China dolls.
These are the hallmarks of a movie that tries to have it both ways. It wants to be relentlessly serious and cool (he smashed that dude with a fucking hammer!) while at the same time engaging in flights of popcorn movie lunacy and nonsense (fight in a strip club dressing room!). That’s a tricky balancing act to pull off, and Drive doesn’t have anywhere near the panache to accomplish it.
Again, none of this is to say that Drive is a bad movie. It isn’t, and its audience Rotten Tomatoes score of 79% seems about right. But it has way too many glaring problems to qualify as a great movie, and that’s what people were promised by critics who were apparently comparing it to Pulp Fiction at Cannes. The noteworthy discrepancy between critical opinion and audience opinion isn’t because of the art house sensibility or the violence. (If anything, the film could use some more violence. There’s only really one car chase in a movie about a getaway driver and the two main bad guys both die off screen.) The discrepancy exists because it just straight up isn’t as good as the critics thought it was.
