DRIVE (R) (9/26/2011)

DRIVE

BY JAKE MATHISON

September 26th, 2011

Starring: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks and Ron Perlman

Directed by: Nicolas Winding Refn

Written by: Hossein Amini (screenplay) and James Sallis (book)

Although it may be impossible, Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive will leave you desperately struggling to define it. It will simultaneously captivate and repulse you. It's a gritty, other-worldly dream loaded with purposeful contradiction and sloppiness. Here, Refn (Bronson) masterfully crafts a quietly chaotic, Kubrickian universe wherein silence is dialogue and dialogue is silence.

The brilliant Ryan Gosling (The Notebook) plays the titular unnamed driver, a mysterious Los Angeles transplant and sometimes Hollywood stunt driver who gets his kicks by moonlighting as a wheelman for the city's seedy underbelly. Gosling's ability to emote without saying anything is uncanny, and you can almost feel his legend growing in Brando like fashion. As such, Driver is a tough, multi-layered character to crack, and his walls often seem nearly impenetrable.

When Driver meets a young mother, played by the beguiling Carey Mulligan (Never Let Me Go), he finally begins to let his guard down. But her ex-con husband returns from prison to reclaim his family and Driver is reluctantly pulled into a heist gone wrong, finding himself in fast trouble with the wrong people (Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman).

This film is timeless. In fact, I'm not even sure it exists in any set time. Refn hasn't thrown us many breadcrumbs either-- save for the occasional sprinkling of some panko. The cast, from top to bottom, is fantastic. Albert Brooks (Modern Romance) shines as a disinterested mafioso. Mulligan digs deep into her character's loneliness and loathing, juxtaposing them with an enviable tenderness that inevitably drives our Driver to his epic conclusions. Drive is a tortuous ride that asks an endless amount of questions and gives almost no answers, but they're fascinating questions and there is great beauty in just how little this film actually reveals. It'll keep you in its stranglehold.

4/5

Drive is Rated R for strong brutal bloody violence, language and some nudity

AP Photo