I saw
Drive in the theater and enjoyed it – it’s a decent popcorn flick. However, it did leave me a bit unsatisfied, and after thinking about it for a minute, I realized why.
Drive is basically a well-crafted bootleg, like a knock off Rolex or Louis Vuitton bag that almost passes for the real thing.
Drive is an amalgamation of many movies that came before it, and on its own, it’s not quite as good as any of the movies it’s influenced by. These include
American Gigolo,
To Live and Die in L.A., Michael Mann’s
Thief,
Bullitt, &
Le Samourai. Even the soundtrack is heavily indebted to Giorgio Moroder’s OST for
Gigolo and Tangerine Dream’s score for
Thief. That’s no coincidence. Part of Tangerine Dream’s score from
Risky Business is actually playing on the car stereo in one of the scenes in
Drive. There’s also a movie from 1978 called
The Driver (that I haven’t seen) that
Drive supposedly also draws a lot of influence from
The two main characters are my biggest problem with the movie. Ryan Gosling is trying to be the
Sigma, lone wolf-type that Richard Gere, William Petersen, James Caan, Steve McQueen, Alain Delon, Clint Eastwood et al. portrayed, but to me he comes across as a cipher with no subtext. Carey Mulligan’s character is also frustrating. In a film noir, she’d be a femme fatale. Here she’s merely a damsel in distress for Ryan Gosling to play Captain Save a Hoe with.
Really, my beef with
Drive is that it’s all style and no substance.
American Gigolo, which is modeled after Robert Bresson’s
Pickpocket, is equally stylish and visually appealing, but there’s a depth to it, a sense of loneliness and mournfulness that stays with me after the film is over. Roger Ebert compared the protagonist of
Pickpocket to
Raskolnikov from Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment. I suppose Raskolnikov is a good model for the sigma character in all these films.
Of course,
American Gigolo was written and directed by Paul Schrader, who wrote the script for
Taxi Driver. That’s a guy who knows a thing or two about isolation and loneliness!
Like I said, I enjoyed
Drive, the head stomping bit is almost worth the price of admission alone. And I'll never complain about having to watch Bryan Cranston or Albert Brooks. But the film seems to be less than the sum of its parts. I highly recommend people check out some of the movies that obviously influenced it.
I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it.…But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights.…There’s a boy who really made something out of nothing. – Raymond Chandler
I also saw and appreciated
Blue Valentine, although it’s rather depressing.
Heartiste pretty much wrote the definitive analysis:
Beta Valentine.
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Movies that
Drive ripped off: Movies that influenced
Drive: