Fascinating, dreamlike, well made film about evil people

Rating: 7/10 (15 June 2012)

This is a film about evil people, killers, robbers, their accomplices, and so forth, but it is made in a dreamlike ethereal style which is most impressive. There is magnificent coordination between the director Nicolas Winding Refn (a Danish American), the cinematographer, and the art director. There are so many exquisitely filmed shots with careful colour composition that the film is highly artistic. Why can't all of that good taste be put to better use with a story and characters which are more pleasant and less despicable? Refn seems to have done previous films with blood, fear, death, etc., in the titles. Pretty creepy. And he writes them as well, which is even more worrying. Ryan Gosling plays an entirely amoral 'driver' who drives criminals to and from their bank robberies and assassinations. He is very good at saying nothing. Christina Hendricks of MAD MEN appears in this in a very minor capacity, presumably because she could only manage a couple of days off from her series to do a few quick scenes. She need not have bothered, because we see so little of her she might have been anyone. OK, it shows she's versatile. So now back to Madison Avenue where we all love her. Carey Mulligan plays the young girl, and she is the 'everybody's sweetheart' type, with the same winsome quality that Gwyneth Paltrow had at her age. We all probably want to watch Carey Mulligan in anything, because she is such a delight. More of her please, less of the criminals.