If space were a highway...

Rating: Null/10 (26 September 2011)

For the people who enjoyed Lost in Translation, but found its frantic pace exhausting to follow, comes Drive, featuring what I can only hope to have been a cardboard cut out of Ryan Gosling.
The movie is methodical in ensuring we come to fully know the stunning character at the heart of the story. We get the opportunity to discover his lack of a past, the charming minimalism of his total lack of plans or aspirations, and witness his life's true passion of sitting quietly behind the wheel of a car, which brings out all three of his facial expressions, including (but not limited to) shifting his gaze to the left, as well as staring blankly forwards.
When he is revealed to be grotesquely violent, we get the opportunity to truly identify with him and get behind our quiet hero as an audience. And the silence isn't just a major element of the lead's equivalent of a character, it is perhaps the true driving force of this show. The dialogue appears to have been written as a statement in protest against the tragic over-use of words in contemporary cinema.
But the visionary direction doesn't just include 2 car chases and 3 combat sequences. You also get to witness one of the most realistic love stories ever to be captured on film. The cast and crew fearlessly explore the honest simplicity that drives good looking people to hook up, where standing quietly in relative proximity to each other builds a relationship the intensity of which could never rise from anything based on verbal communication.
Any review of Drive would do it a great injustice by forgetting to mention the soundtrack. Despite horribly clashing with much of the moving pictures, some of the songs are quite pleasant, and we get a distinct feeling that unlike the other borderline-criminals responsible for this unique event, the sound folks are actually on our side, as their composition joins us in occasionally drifting off into sleepy silence through yet another scene of Ryan Gosling staring blankly into the future, wondering how badly his career will be derailed by his role in this atrocity.
I hope you don't get to see this film, and therefore maintain an ability to believe that the movie studios could not be so casually cruel to us, their audiences.