The Movie I Always Wanted to See, and Nobody Had Made Before

Rating: 10/10 (17 January 2013)

Drive is the movie I always wanted to see and nobody had ever directed before. It is the story of an unnamed, lonely stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver. The driver falls in love (or at least he seems to) with his neighbor, but an attempt to help her ex-con husband triggers a deadly chain of events.
Drive is a great movie because its style is as important as its plot in telling the story. With only a few scattered lines and lots of silence, the extraordinarily gifted director Nicolas Winding Refn is in charge of telling most of the story through his cameras. And he does, and well! Refn's way of framing every scene is exceptionally powerful in conveying the character's emotions. The exchanges between Ryan Gosling and Corey Mulligan are loaded with unspoken emotions. The occasional bursts of violence are intense and explosive, hard and unforgiven, without the cathartic overtones of Tarantino's. The car chases are focused and intense, because they feel what a real car chase should feel like, concentrated on the goal of saving your own life, and not on the roller-coaster's thrill of driving fast.
The entire movie's style is based on the tension between the dryness and brutality of the character's interactions on screen, and their emotional world as communicated by the visuals and the movie's score. In fact, Drive's music (sophisticated, nightly, electronic) is the off-screen main character. Its retro style gives the film a dreamy atmosphere, keeping it half-way between the gritty reality of the story and a wonderful and poetic heroism that makes up fairy tales and knight stories. The movie keeps these two distant worlds apart and strangely connected, which is what makes it movie so powerful in the first place.
Some commentators compared this movie to "Layer Cake" or "Lock, Stock". They are seriously mistaken. The only thing in common with "Layer Cake" is that the main character remains unnamed. The only thing in common with "Lock, Stock" is that the director is European. "Drive" is not a crime story, at least not in a strict sense. Drive is distilled movie about an archetypal lonely hero. It is a movie about whether we really have choices in our life, or we are bound to follow our nature. And it is one of the few masterpieces I have seen in many years.