Drive

Other people in the theater did not like Drive as much as I did.  I think I understand why--it's very slow and when it is not slow it is very brutal. If you went there to see Ryan Gosling looking pretty, and driving fast, you could reasonably feel disappointed. If your objection to the movie is that it lacks a moral center though, I think you have missed the point. I think the joke is on you, for thinking you could get your morals from the movies in the first place. Drive is an examination not just of violence, but of violence in the movies. It is a movie about movies.

Drive is all dressed up as an eighties movie. The music, the scribbly pink text of the credits, the costumes (especially Christina Hendricks in one particularly rad acid-washed tight gray hoodie), the way the romantic relationship develops mostly in eye contact and awkward silences--every scene that is not drenched in blood feels like it would be right at home in Some Kind of Wonderful or Pretty in Pink.

The main character, who does not have a name, is a stunt driver. When he puts on a mask and gets in a police car he will drive for the scene, then we see the car crash and flip over, it is impossible not to think about the other stunt driver, the guy who is really actually driving that car in that scene. I am not saying it is staggeringly original, but it is layered--there is Ryan Gosling, then there is the character he is playing ("driver"), who is wearing the face of another actor, but inside that costume is actually another actor, a real-life stunt driver. Albert Brooks (scary Albert Brooks!) plays a film producer/investor/criminal--he talks about the european action movies he used to produce—he thought they were shitty, in case you were wondering. In case you were wondering whether the movies are terrible and corrupt? Oh yes, they are.

There is a scene in an elevator. A bad guy, and Carey Mulligan, and Gosling is there to keep her safe, and she doesn't really know. Like the rest of the movie, this scene is mostly silent. Then in slow motion, Gosling moves the girl into the corner, in slow motion he kisses her, and the lights of the elevator obligingly dim to match the action of the scene. This is the sort of thing that happens in movies. The lights come back and the kiss ends, and Gosling beats the bad guy to death with his hands and feet, literally crushing his skull under his heel. The violence in this moment is astonishing, and as Carey Mulligan backs slowly out of the elevator, she seems to hold a lot of different emotions in balance on her face: shock, fear, disappointment, confusion, bewilderment. And maybe I'm overreaching here, but I think the reaction is sadness and regret, and also betrayal: he is thinking, What did you expect?

That's what the movie was saying, to those ladies behind me who groaned when Albert Brooks deocculated a guy with a fork, and giggled when Ron Perlman said "fuck" for the five-hundredth time. You came to the movies--you aren't here for a nonviolent resolution, or for complicated depthy characters. You came here for some cowboy violence and some fast driving. Careful what you wish for.