Drive

Saw Drive. It was directed by the same guy who did Only God Forgives. This film is very similar in its shocking colors, its meditative pace, its zen calm. This one is much more accessible however. It follows a stunt man/getaway driver who starts cozying up to his pretty neighbor whose husband is in prison. Husband comes back from prison and the driver, great guy that he is, tries to help the husband get out of his mob ties. This spirals out of control further and further. The film is very well crafted. It's poetic and simple, entrancing but without tipping its hand.

The film opens with hot-pink credits written in loopy hand-writing over a fly-over shot of a city. It's hearkening back hard to the blockbuster action films of the 80s. The protagonist works in film. A supporting character is a film financier. There's a moment early on when the driver and the neighbor are on a kind-of date and this song comes on singing that "you're a real human being and a real hero." This is so on-the-nose with what the film is trying to accomplish in this scene, it can't be accidental. It seems like a self-aware deconstruction of the 1980s action hero. The protagonist is completely selfless (children love him) but then there's also a scene where he stomps on a man's head until it bursts into mush. The brutality of the archetype is not soft-pedaled in this scene. The protagonist says little and implies much. He seems iconic; archetypal.

The film's beautiful slow shots are entrancing. The other characters have a similarly iconic feel to them (the crooked friend, the stoolie, the dame) and the film consequently has a simple and closed-world feel. All of the characters are set up and then interact. No new characters are introduced after about the half-way point. At one point the neighbor's son is watching cartoons and the protagonist asks him who the bad guy is. When the kid points and says "that one" he presses him about how he knows that that's a bad guy. "Just look at him," the kid says. The man whose head the protagonist stomps on is not clearly identified as a bad guy, but, being a man in a cheap suit, he clearly is. Just look at him.

A very interesting film. Slow and entrancing and much more comprehensible and accessible than Only God Forgives. Check it out.