Drive

Drive has become an incredibly divisive film with people either calling it 'genius' or 'incredibly pretentious and slow.' I guess I fall closer to the former camp, but I can't say I fell as head over heels in love with it as a lot of its defenders.

The film follows an un-named driver (Ryan Gosling) who works as a stuntman/mechanic/getaway driver, and goes through life saying as little as possible. He eventually forms a relationship with a neighboring woman (Carey Mulligan) and her child, but when he tries to help her recently released (from prison) husband get out of some trouble, things, to say the least, go bad. And that's pretty much the whole plot. The film as a whole is a slow burn, punctuated by moments of extreme violence. With one notable exception (which I'll get to in a minute) it doesn't lay anything out for you, and just tries to communicate via subtext with as little dialogue as possible. And in general I liked this approach. The whole thing has a sort of hypnotic quality, and I appreciated that the script doesn't feel the need to underline every beat. Basically stuff happens, they don't try to soften the idea that the ostensible hero is a bit of a pshycopath (of course so is Batman), and you just kind of have to roll with it. That's all good.

However there are two things in the film that kept me from completely embracing it.

1) The music. I actually like the choice of using sort of euro-pop electronica to score the film. It fits the overall vibe well. What doesn't work are the lyrics. While the rest of the film tries hard to let the subtext and the emotion speak for themselves, the song lyrics are the complete opposite and blatantly spell out every emotion that the characters might be experiencing. Seriously it reminded of the Family Guy joke where Randy Newman just wrote songs about what was happening. It would be like you see a film where a guy just killed his brother and a song started where the words were 'Oh I bet you feel really bad and conflicted...' Just a weird choice that completely out of sync with the rest of the film.

2) I'm sorry but any film set in Los Angeles that features multiple car chases, and not one instance where they're sitting in traffic just throws me out of the reality of the story. Seriously, these guys were driving back and forth from the Valley in broad daylight at one point, weaving all over, probably averaged like 80 mph, and only saw other cars sporadically. I call BS. Having sat through LA traffic for years I think I can reasonably say this isn't possible (definitely not at the regularity that the film portrays it). The only time I was driving as unimpeded that the chases in the film, was new years eve 2009 coming home from a 10 pm screening of The Bad Lieutenant at the New Beverly. And that was so eerie we spent the whole time commenting on how crazy the whole thing was, and that we were probably going to get car jacked at any point.

In an even more ridiculous moment, Drive features a scene where Gosling is making a get away drive around the staples center during a game with no significant other of cars around. In fact they show that no fans leave the game until the final tip, enabling him to sneak away in the mass exit. Right. First of all there would have been a steady stream of ans leaving from the middle of the 4th quarter on, and he wouldn't have been able to make a qucik left turn within two miles of the stadium. The only film to less accurately portray LA travel is 500 days of summer that somehow made it look like lots of people use the subway.