Starring: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Category: III
'It's the inside rather than the outside that counts,' the mobster Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) tells an associate in a scene midway into Drive. The line is applicable to quite a few things in the narrative - it could have been about the cars or the Los Angeles streetscapes they travel in or the heists carried out by people in those cars - but may also be director Nicolas Winding Refn's hint at where the strength of his film lies, beyond the thrills and the fantasy.
In a dramatic departure from his previous film, the fantastical epic Valhalla Rising, Refn has created a movie - as controlled as it is about control itself - about a wheelman who spirals towards psychosis when his grip on his life falls slowly apart.
Adapted from a James Sallis novel, Drive revolves around a nameless gear-grinder (Ryan Gosling, above) who earns a salary doing movie stunts during the day. That's just 'part-time', he says - because the real (and illicit) dollars flow from his work as a nighttime getaway driver, a job he performs with stoicism and discipline. He dictates clearly his terms to his employers: he never waits for more than five minutes outside the scene of a crime and doesn't sit in on hold-ups or carry a gun.
'I just drive,' he says. His matter-of-fact attitude is illustrated in the opening sequence, during which Refn establishes not just the driver's personality - cool, detached, somewhat alienated from the amorality and violence around him - but also that of Los Angeles as an agglomeration of barren surfaces, a feel heightened by the soundtrack of cold synth-pop and Cliff Martinez's glacial electronic doodles.
While he at first seems emotionless about nearly everything - whether it's signing a waiver of a film production crew's liability for anything that could happen to him on set, or being asked to show off his skills to the sleazy Rose, who's considering financing his transformation into a race car driver - the protagonist's veneer begins to crack when he meets Irene (Carey Mulligan). Softened by this platonic romance with his waitress neighbour and his role as surrogate father to her son, Benicio (Kaden Leos), his world becomes slightly unhinged when her ex-con husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac) returns home.