Get Ready to Be Played Like a Piano. And Pounded Like One, Too.

Rating: 9/10 (28 October 2011)

The first time we see the Driver, he's the wheelman for a getaway car, who evades police pursuit not simply with speed and force but by taking calm advantage of the street landscape and outmaneuvering his chasers. Its up there with some of the best car chases I've ever seen. By day, he's a stunt driver for action movies. The two jobs are no contradiction for him: He drives. As played by Ryan Gosling, he's in the convention of Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name and Alain Delon's Jef Costello. No family, no past and ostensibly few feelings. He's an existential hero, It would seem, characterized completely by his actions.
That would meet the criteria for the hero of a tedious action movie, but Drive is an utterly graceful implementation of style, and its feelings may be submerged but they resonate intensely. The mystery of Gosling's wheelman is surrounded by a fertile balcony of tangential actors who are clear about their plans and suspicions, and who have either reached an understanding with the Driver, or not, yet another example of the old Hollywood noir tenet that a movie breathes not merely through its hero, but from its shadows.
The Driver actually lives somewhere. Somehow that seems amazing. Played by Carey Mulligan, his neighbor is a model for defenselessness. She has a young son, Benicio, who appears to motivate warmth in the Driver, though he isn't a demonstrative sort. They become friendly, but soon, her husband Standard is sprung from prison. Counter to our almost certain expectations, Standard isn't resentful or antagonistic toward the new friend, but evaluates him, sees someone formidable, and find they can help each other. That will supply the locomotive for the story, and as Irene and Benicio are threatened, the Driver unravels intense feelings and allegiances, and suffers massive peril at little real advantage to himself.
The film is populated with characters who bring volumes to the screen, counter to the Driver, who brings nothing but pure presence. Ron Perlman looks to be a major operator working out of the petty frontage of a strip mall pizzeria. Albert Brooks, every bit as formidable as you'd never expect, plays a producer of the sorts of B movies the Driver drives stunt for, one of his business ventures as a powerful local mobster. These people are cold-blooded. More benevolent is the great Bryan Cranston, as the sort of guy the Driver has to have backing him, a whiz at car repairs, and supercharging.
Drive appears to have little CGI. Most of the stunt driving seems authentic, with cars of mass and heaviness, instead of ridiculous animated fantasies. The whole movie, actually, is incomparably more genuine than the typical action-crime-chase fabrications we've become bored with. Here's a movie with deference to writing, acting, technique and well-informed moviegoers. The crucial feeling you want to experience during a chase sequence is participation in its intent. You have to worry. Almost always nowadays, we're just watching fast machinery.
Ryan Gosling is a magnetic actor, a modest one. He exemplifies aura and unaffectedness. For as long as we've been seeing him in movies, he's demonstrated a knack for discovering striking, commanding characters. An actor who can make us believe he's become smitten by an anatomically correct doll can realize practically anything. Drive looks like one kind of movie in the ads, and it is that kind of movie, but also a rebuke to most of the movies it looks like.