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Arts & Entertainment

Mesmerizing 'Drive' Floors Expectations

Ryan Gosling finds a great vehicle for his talents in Nicolas Winding Refn's electrifying film.

What a great year for Ryan Gosling. Hot off the heels of his Oscar-worthy performance in Derek Cianfrance’s overlooked masterpiece, Blue Valentine, Gosling has starred in one of the summer’s most enjoyable comedies (Crazy, Stupid, Love) and will soon be featured alongside several of America’s most respected leading men in George Clooney’s political thriller, The Idea of March.

Yet no film has ever solidified the 30-year-old actor’s movie star status quite like Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive.

Action junkies expecting a Transporter-style lark are going to feel cheated by the misleading ads. Though Drive was originally intended to be a standard Hollywood vehicle for Hugh Jackman, the project fell through and was picked up by Gosling.

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Instead of choosing a reliable commercial auteur to fill the director’s chair, the actor went with Refn, a Danish filmmaker renowned for his existential character portraits and stylized depictions of violence in pictures such as Bronson and the Pusher trilogy.

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Refn has sported a great deal of promise in his previous work, but he has never quite managed to synthesize his audacious storytelling with characters worthy of an audience’s emotional investment. His previous films were fascinating experiments that delivered mixed results, but Drive leaves them all in the dust.

Drive is the director’s most assured and resonant work to date. It’s also unlike anything in mainstream American cinema, and is bound to rub some viewers the wrong way (particularly the squeamish). But serious cinephiles and adventurous moviegoers are guaranteed to have their minds blown and their pulse racing well beyond the final frame.

Like the mysterious hero of Refn’s last grisly effort, Valhalla Rising, the “Driver” portrayed by Gosling has no name, speaks few words, and is capable of both extreme brutality and selfless heroism. He’s as much a mythological figure as he is a flesh-and-blood mortal, and the genius of Refn’s approach is the way in which he allows classic Hollywood archetypes to be filtered through his distinctive European sensibility.

Refn and his screenwriter, Hossein Amini, went back to James Sallis’s novel, which loosely provided the source material for the scrapped Jackman vehicle, and used it as their chief inspiration. The protagonist’s day-job as a stunt performer on movie sets was brought back into the story, thus allowing the aura of cinematic fantasy to surrealistically blend into the sleek LA landscape.

Since the trailers give far too much away, here are the basics: Driver (Gosling) lives a dangerous double life. While he spends his days racing cars in front of the cameras, he provides his services to random crooks in need of a getaway car at night. The film’s brilliant pre-title sequence follows Gosling behind the wheel as he snakes his way through claustrophobic streets to outwit police. Yet the driver’s inner humanity shines through when he befriends his neighbor (the ever-radiant Carey Mulligan), a young mother whose husband (Oscar Isaac) is in prison.

For much of the film’s first hour, Gosling and Mulligan’s budding relationship is conveyed primarily through facial nuances and meaningful pauses between words. It’s clear that Mulligan sees him as an opportunity to build a new life while providing a more stable role model for her son. Yet when Isaac is released and tries to cut ties with his criminal bosses, the lives of his family are instantly threatened.

Gosling takes it upon himself to ensure that the lives of innocents are protected from an assortment of underworld scum led by a former film producer (Albert Brooks). 

Even though his role is probably too small to garner much attention during awards season, the stunt casting of genial comedian Brooks as a cold-blooded killer is one of the picture’s greatest masterstrokes. In his various side-splitting classics (such as Lost in America, Defending Your Life and Mother), Brooks inhabited a persona as neurotic as it was drolly deadpan.

His amiable crankiness during his early scenes in Drive is not far removed from that of his previous characters, which makes his violent outbursts all the more shocking. He’s well paired with Ron Perlman (TV's Sons of Anarchy), whose larger-than-life physicality is evocative of a muscle-clad Fred Gwynne. 

With its vintage vehicles and pop-synth soundtrack, Drive often resembles a long lost B-movie classic from the 1970s infused with A-grade craftsmanship and operatic ambition.

As the driver starts to literally take on the role of a vengeful movie hero, Refn and his phenomenal crew (notably cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, editor Matthew Newman and supervising sound editor Lon Bender) create a series of hyperviolent set pieces as hypnotically dreamlike as they are viscerally powerful.

Throughout it all, Gosling hits complex notes of fear, vulnerability, consuming rage and compassion without ever raising his voice. He is an actor of the highest caliber and Drive is cinema at its finest.

Drive opened Sept. 16 at the AMC Showplace Village Crossing 18 and Regal Gardens 1-6 in Skokie. It opened at No. 3 behind The Lion King 3D and Contagion, earning $11 million in weekend ticket sales, according to Box Office Mojo. It is rated R.

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