The mesmeric qualities of Refn’s filmmaking make taking in all of this cacophonous and terrifying information a leisurely, sensual matter. The sparse dialogue and the long stretches of silence surrounding it make the monologues outlining the fascist mindset stand out like towering obelisks of ideology. The performances of the five leading actors are masterful in their vagueness, blank screens against which we can project our own hopes, fears, and lusts. The result is a show for our time. It is perhaps the show of our time.

I reviewed the season finale of Too Old to Die Young for Decider. (I’m gonna be playing some catch-up on old links, so these descriptions are gonna be pretty no-nonsense. But this was a hell of a show, I’ll say that!)

Titled “The Empress,” presumably in reference to Yaritza though quite possibly in reference to Diana—and it seems like a lot will be riding on the answer to this riddle in the finale—the penultimate episode of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s masterpiece of surrealist noir is less an advancement of the plot than an escalation, or the promise of one to come.

I reviewed episode nine of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Aside from Fargo Season Three and David Thewlis’s hideously acquisitive character V.M. Varga, Too Old to Die Young is the only show I personally have seen that responds to the Trump era with appropriate and unvarnished disgust and fury. In the person of Martin’s openly fascist colleagues on the Homicide squad (sample quotes from this episode: “DEMOCRACY’S MY BITCH! FAKE NEWS! JESUS!”) and Janey’s perverted billionaire father, this show identifies the enemy, hones in on the twin poles of their reactionary politics—a belief in the virtue of violence against the unclean and a belief that the vulnerable exist to be exploited, abused, and discarded, both of them privileges of the select—and creates narrative situations that alternately expose them for the monstrous cretins they are and punish them appropriately.

I reviewed episode eight of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

So, we have fascist, racist law enforcement officers who prey on children. We have a grotesque billionaire who declares, publicly and repeatedly, that he’s sexually attracted to his own daughter. And we have a tremendous explosion of horrific violence.

I dunno. Think there’s a connection to be made there? Think there’s a topical subtext to Too Old to Die Young‘s vicious, vacuous killers and their flimsy yet fanatical justifications for murder? Think there’s something about Janey’s dad that trumps his role in the story—something that connects him to the real world, and invites thoughts of not just punishment but retribution? Think there’s more going on here than just what shows up on the screen?

I reviewed episode seven of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Running through the plot in this much detail is kind of a must, given how little there is to say about what happens. Aside from the final scene, and everything that happened off camera before the events of the episode begin, and maybe the Janey encounter, there’s just not much there, there. But when a show is this accomplished, this confident, this unlike anything else on the air, it doesn’t matter what is there. The journey is at least half the fun. Like Jesus’s Mama Magdalena, Too Old to Die Young is simply an acquired taste.

I reviewed episode six of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Let us sing the praises of James Urbaniak, whose dark energy in “The Fool,” the riveting fifth episode of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s currently peerless crime drama, is powerful enough to fuel the goddamn Death Star.

I reviewed episode five of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

The fourth installment of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s extended meditation on the evil that men do is one of the most unnerving episodes of television in recent memory. I’d put it up there with any highlight you’d care to name from The Terror, The Act, Channel Zero, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, and even the gut-churning war-crime climax of Game of Thrones.

I reviewed episode four of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Titled “The Hermit” after the corresponding card from the tarot (that’s where every episode gets its moniker), the third exquisite installment of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young has only one thing wrong with it that I can see: It could have been longer.

I reviewed episode three of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Murder? Yes. Illicit sex? You bet. Gross rich criminal father figure? Mmhm. Hot monochromatic and duochromatic lighting? Oh, indeed. Tracking shots and camera pans so slow they should be measured by half-life? Absolutely. Yes, most of what characterized the first episode of Too Old to Die Young shows up in the show’s second outing as well. With one major exception: the main character.

I reviewed episode two of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Here’s a cinematic axiom you can take to the bank: It’s impossible to be pretentious when you’re patient.

At the very least it’s damn difficult. To the extent pretentiousness means anything (other than “this person thinks they’re better than me and my concern is they’re right”) it signals that an artist is rubbing an unearned sense of intellectual or aesthetic superiority in the audience’s face. The last thing a truly pretentious artist would want is to give that audience time to think. For one thing, pretentious artists don’t believe the audience is capable of thinking, at least not on their own level. More importantly, time for the audience to think is time better spent showing off.

Now consider Nicholas Winding Refn, one of Danish cinema’s many enfants terribles. With each film he’s made since his breakthrough Drive—the Ryan Gosling reunion Only God Forgives, the Elle Fanning fashion-horror freakout The Neon Demon, and now Too Old to Die Young, an elephantine miniseries co-created by crime comics writer Ed Brubaker—his willingness to not bum-rush the viewer from one signpost of his ostensible genius to the next has grown to an almost perverse degree.

For all their lurid colors, lurid subject matter, and ultraviolence, Refn’s movies are ssssslllllllloooooooowwwwwwwwwww. Closeups, zooms, pans, tracking shots, exchanges of dialogue, tones from Cliff Martinez’s vibratory scores: They all proceed at the pace of the profoundly stoned, which indeed is the best state in which to watch them. While dazzling, I don’t think their intent is to dazzle, since that implies a reflective surface. If you like a Refn movie it’s because you sink right into it, and can float around inside it with the company of your own thoughts to fill the space, kill the time, and assign meaning to these multicolored worlds full of moral morons.

This is my long-winded way of saying “The Devil,” the feature-length pilot episode of Refn & Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young, whips ass. Am I being pretentious? That, dear reader, is for you to decide.

I reviewed the series premiere of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young for Decider. This show is exquisite and disturbing. (NB: Descriptions in these link posts will be minimal due to me playing catch-up. I guess you’ll just have to go read the reviews!)

Only God Forgives is director Nicholas Winding Refn’s own Drive reaction video. The middle-aged foreign not-white cop we’re trained to think will be the villain is in fact the one who’s heroically doling out street justice, hurting only those who hurt others. He’s the Driver. The strong, silent, handsome, blond American interloper is no white savior, and he’s only even the villain accidentally, if at all. Mainly he’s a sad and ineffectual patsy, cannon fodder caught up in the larger struggle between the hero and Kristin Scott Thomas’s Tiamat figure. (Refn’s solution to making particular character troubling in that particular way is to run right at it; the last time we see her, Gosling has his hand in her fucking womb.) It’s like Refn picked us up from where we were standing at the end of Drive, moved us a couple windows over, and showed us the same thing, using our knowledge of narrative convention to show how heroism and horror are a matter of perspective.

Maybe it’s just the YouTube of “A Real Hero” talking, but I find myself more warmly disposed toward Drive today than I was when I wrote this. I still feel that when a film of this film’s obvious intelligence dances this close to the whole “down these mean streets a man must go” necessary-violence thing, it’s a lot tougher to get past than when a film of obvious stupidity does so. (I watch Road House a lot.) And I still maintain that the film didn’t push the Driver far enough in one direction or another emotionally for us to have a working context for his violent outbursts. But in retrospect I can see little pointillist moments almost coalescing into something emotionally coherent. His completely unknown past prior to six years ago; the way he draws the line at violence but nevertheless still possesses a familiarity with and talent for the criminal world; the totally convincing viciousness of his threat against the guy he once drove when they bump into each other at that diner; the effortless rapidity with which he adjusts to kill-or-be-killed violence; his obvious guilt over his involvement with Standard’s final criminal act and subsequent death; the slow-mo shot of him looking horrified after he kills the man in the elevator; wearing a mask the one time he intentionally sets out to kill someone; leaving the cash behind; leaving Irene and Benicio behind even though no one’s out to get him or them anymore; even Standard’s lingered-on homecoming speech about how what he did in the past was shameful, but now he’s got a second chance…If I were the theorizing type, my theory would be that once upon a time the Driver was a real rough customer, but he changed, and the events of the film brought out a side in him he’d long suppressed, and so he abandons the woman and child he’s come to care about rather than subject them to it again.

The reason I’d love for this to be a little more than theorizing is not because I need things spoonfed to me — what I’m calling for is more emotional information, not more plot-fact information — but because it would be interesting for the film to have developed the Driver more in this regard. I don’t know if Matt Seneca was kidding when he suggested the film should have shown the Driver crying after he killed the two guys who attacked him and Blanche in the hotel, but amen to that. That’s a scene I’d have liked to see.

But I saw plenty of lovely things. The film was impeccably cast and delightfully acted, from Gosling’s quiet kindness to Ron Perlman grinning Noo Yawk gangsterisms. The ’80s look and sound was luscious and unpretentious. The violence was refreshingly hideous, mitigating against the redemptive role it plays in the narrative. And even if it didn’t quite get there emotionally, I do feel like it tried, and it had enough other things going for it that, to a degree at least, it can be forgiven for stopping short of where it needed to go. In many ways my entire life up until this point has put me on a quest for sad trash, and Drive comes pretty close.

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.