A Masterful Dream

Rating: 9/10 (17 September 2011)

Nicolas Winding Refn has given us an odyssey with a dreamlike Los Angeles and a getaway driver who exists as an existential representation of getaway drivers and hidden demons. What's inside someone who risks their life for work and pleasure? From the driver's point of view it's probably a way to feel actually Alive, as if too much downtime were the opposite of being alive, causing pain he believes nobody would understand, and he doesn't show himself and is unable to express his internal world unless it's deeply troubling him. He's the guardian angel of revenge when a mother and child have been stricken with bad-guy gangster flu. That's the mystery Winding Refn has mastered here. What grueling violence must we face when the Rose's and Nino's come uninvited into our lives? What's underneath our surfaces? The Driver describes at the end, one day of joyriding with Irene and Benicio was the best day of his life. I think he was deeply serious about that! And I think Nicolas Winding Refn might be Hitchcock, Lynch, and Scorsese rolled into one director.