Modern Noir

Rating: Null/10 (8 September 2011)

"If I drive for you, you give me a time and a place. I give you a five-minute window, anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours no matter what. I don't sit in while you're running it down; I don't carry a gun... I drive." Driver (Ryan Gosling)
I can't believe it! Driver is a suitable companion to The Debt and Point Blank, two outstanding thrillers of summer 2011. Maybe it's because I just co-hosted a Western film series with heavy doses of Eastwood. While this film features a lone hero, Driver (Ryan Gosling), in the taciturn mode of Westerns and Scorsese urban tales, it also is a study of small time hoodlums trying to get along.
Drive is a blend of action and psychology as we try to figure out how this Hollywood stuntman drives for crimes, survives, and quietly loves his neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan), and her son, Benecio (Kaden Leos). Protecting those two is the clue to seeing the other side of his robotic mien, the entrée into his humanity. Alas, that care is the source of losing his independence and safety. With the likes of criminal kingpin Bernie Rose (a surprisingly effective Albert Brooks) hanging about, no one, not even our ultra-competent hero, is safe.
Director Nicholas Winding Refn has jumped to the head of the line for cinematography that matters (see the reflective shots), elevating what may be a classic thriller into a study of marrying sight to meaning. Wait! Wait! The original music by Cliff Martinez has vocals so well wedded to meaning as to make even me, a screenplay-loving critic, take notice.
When I began seeing Robert De Niro as I watched Driver's lonely odyssey, and when I thought of Steve McQueen driving the hills of San Francisco as Driver careened through L.A.'s mean streets, I knew I was in the presence of a modern noir with the trappings of a classic.