SPOILERS AHOY
You’re right, I am quite imaginative with my post titles. Thank you!
As the credits rolled and I contemplated the final decision made by the Driver as depicted in the final two shots, I thought to myself, “At this late stage, with all the other players eliminated, why wouldn’t he choose to go back to Irene and Benicio, if they’d have him?” I think I might have an answer, about which more later, but my main internal response to that question was just to shrug and wonder how you could really know anything about this guy as written.
“By their works ye shall know them” is a decent standard to apply to fictional depictions of bastardry and brutality, I think, but there was simply no way to apply it to the Driver in any way that made sense. Though he exuded a crinkly-eyed, quiet kindness throughout the film, especially in his tender interactions with Irene and Benicio but more revealingly with Shannon and especially Standard, and though he repeatedly insisted upon remaining an unarmed and inactive participant in the crimes he facilitated as the driver, he’s suddenly Jason Bourne at the drop of a hat when threatened. Not only is he a ruthlessly efficient killing machine, he’s cruel on more than one occasion: threatening to torture Blanche, actually torturing Cooke.
The problem on a structural level is that his actions, in and of themselves, are virtually indistinguishable from those of Bernie Rose, an equally proficient and brutal murderer who, like the Driver, does not seem thrilled about having been placed in this predicament. But Bernie’s clearly a bad guy by the standard of the film — as Benicio might say, just look at him, does he look like a good guy to you? But that distinction, between the good savagery of the Driver and the bad savagery of Bernie, is unearned. I know what Bernie is because of what I see him do. I see the Driver do similar things but I’m supposed to “know” that he’s something else. Is he?
I suppose you could say that that slow-motion shot of the Driver as he stares in apparently guilt-stricken horror at Irene after he crushes the guy’s skull in the elevator, coupled with the rivers of flop sweat pouring down his face as he confronts Nino over the phone while holding a hammer to Cooke’s head, is an indication that the Driver is deeply uncomfortable with the violence he’s forced to perpetrate. If that’s the case, then it follows that he leaves Irene and Benicio behind out of concern that he’s no good for them, even though they’re unlikely to be menaced by gangsters anymore. But his unthinking skill in this department, and those flashes of cruelty, are really hard to square not just with his niceness to his friends, but with all our other knowledge of his character — the hardworking kid who showed up at Shannon’s shop and worked for a song, the talented driver who doubles for the star of the movie and persuades gangsters to invest hundreds of thousand of dollars in a potential racing career, the getaway driver who limits his involvement with heists to five minutes of nonviolent chauffeuring.
The answer to the riddle is likely that the Driver’s just a type. He’s the reluctant hero, the good man forced to be a hard man. But while I can accept all of Drive‘s other thoughtful, beautifully executed homages to the Hollywood tradition — the Risky Business/Body Double score, the Taxi Driver lights in the windshield, the Lost Highway/Mulholland Dr. Weird Los Angeles vibe, the Man With No Name near-mute nameless protagonist, whatever — I have a hard time accepting a movie-person in place of an actual person. I didn’t used to, but I think I do now. I feel like the movie knew it needed to make the violence really horrifying to deflate the surrounding Coolness, and I’m glad it did, but I don’t think the emotional violence was commensurate. And to the extent that our satisfaction with the movie hinges so much on an emotional connection with those final shots of Irene knocking on the Driver’s door to no avail and the Driver driving away, a lack of emotional veracity elsewhere blows a hole in the whole thing.
Tags: Drive, movie reviews, movies, Nicholas Winding Refn, reviews
“But his unthinking skill in this department, and those flashes of cruelty, are really hard to square not just with his niceness to his friends, but…”
That seems partly intentional: not even HE knew he had this in him. Refn seems to see the willingness to do violence in defense of your loved ones as a condition for true heroism. But this is definitely not a movie filled with real people…
Well, it’s tough to say if he knew or if he didn’t. As Dustin implies below, his skills at violence are more credible if you believe that before he became Shannon’s mechanic six years ago, he did a lot more dirty work.
Sean I would say that the driver’s position as a kind of moral cipher is what animates the movie, or at least what animates it for me. The shift from The Boyfriend Who’s Good With Kids to a crazy killer with sweat beads flying everywhere is a symptom of a duality that runs throughout the film, and a source of a lot of the insane tension. The fact that there’s not a lot of functional difference between he and Bernie is maybe the point–they both *appear* to not like violence and consider it an unpleasant necessity, but lookie here, Bernie has a fancy box filled with fancy knives for killing people, and Ryan Gosling has… well I don’t know what the analogue would be for him, honestly.
But a lot of the movie seems to be about things switching, about characters moving through that weird dappled shadow of our expectations. The scene where time slows down in the elevator, and I swear I thought it was about to be the messiest, bloodiest movie kiss ever (although it did end up pretty messy); or the way Ryan Gosling puts that mask on to kill the dude, even though there was no reason. It’s not like his identity was a secret. He didn’t have to trick anybody. He just put on a new face, maybe a face that was okay with killing that guy in cold blood. I’m not sure. It’s one of the things I liked about the movie, the not knowing.
And narratively, think of this: what was Ryan Gosling before he showed up at Bryan Cranston’s door 6 years ago? Before the movie, who was he? How did he learn all his Jason Bourne head-stomping magic? And where will he go after the movie? Are there other Irene and Benicio’s? By getting his hands dirty, has he “ruined” this iteration of whoever he is? Is his life with Irene and Benicio tainted?
I admit, part of the hold this movie has on me is that I CAN NOT get that goddamn Kavinksy song out of my head, so I may just be hypnotized. But the moral fluidity of the two main characters was jusssst right for me. Usually I’m like you, where I suspect laziness. “It’s too hard to have a reason that makes sense, so we’ll just leave it open-ended.” But in this case the notes added up for me.
You know, I thought Gosling was much younger than he was, so that “six years ago” his character was a teenager and thus presumably not an experienced killer. But he’s actually almost 31, so that gives the movie more leeway than I thought.
he shoulda cried after he kills those dudes in the hotel, i thought he was going to. that would have made it like a 10x better movie
I bow to no one in my appreciation of grown men crying in movies, so I’m right there with you. Babies, animals, and grown men crying, that’s my tearjerker recipe right there.
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