Drive

Drive (2011). Director: Nicholas Winding Refn

Ten minutes into the movie and I knew that Drive was going to be great. Although I was not wrong in expecting a fast paced story with well made action sequences, what really surprised me was how much more Drive had to offer. The surprise, I believe, had everything to do with its main character, Driver. 

By day, Driver was a car mechanic and occasionally did some stunt driving gigs for movie sets. By night, he picked up robbers from heist scenes and drove them to safety. He was an enigmatic figure whose past was completely unknown to us. We didn’t even get to know his real name throughout the whole movie. Driver lived a life of solitude and kept almost everything to himself. His life changed, however, when he met Irene, a young mother whose husband was serving a sentence in jail, and her son Benicio. Driver started to care about them and gradually assumed the role of a guardian in the face of incoming threats. Quite obviously, the plot of the movie wasn’t all that original, and a main character in such stories could easily fall into a bland stereotype that lacked depth of a real human being. Not our Driver here. The director and Ryan Gosling did such a fantastic job portraying a quiet, reserved man, who possesses a gentle heart but at the same time a violent streak. Looking at Driver reminded me of Leon, the protagonist in Leon the Professional (another wonderful movie). They were variations of the same type of character that I always have a particular fondness to: men who don’t express themselves through eloquent speeches but instead revealing their gentle and selfless nature by the things they do. Therefore, I related to Driver right away because he fit so perfectly into this “gentle giant” category. 

With a character that I could relate to, the storytelling did every justice it could to develop Driver to its fullest. The story took its time revealing Driver’s inner world, showing how Irene and Benicio made ripples to his universe as they became part of his life. Driver’s affections for Irene and Benicio were justified, as were his selfless actions to protect them from harm. With his emotions and motivations well explained, Driver thus had depth. What made Driver even more fascinating as a character was the duality within his personality. The director used the action scenes in Drive to depict one pole of such duality, giving those scenes more profound meanings than mere entertainment or narrative necessity. Those action scenes were there to shed more light on the dark side of Driver, to offer a sharp contrast between his selfless resolution to protect Irene and Benicio and his violent actions to achieve that resolution. As sympathetic as the Driver’s darkness may seem, I liked it that the story let us see clearly that dark deeds begets dark consequences. This brought me to my favorite scene in the movie, where the duality of the character was presented, along with the consequence of such duality. In this scene, Driver realized he and Irene were in the elevator with a hitman sent by the villain. Upon knowing the hitman’s identity, Driver slowly pushed the girl behind him, bent down to kiss her on the mouth, turned around to knock the hitman down on the floor and stomped his head to a pulp. This brutal act clearly terrified Irene, and she ran out of the elevator as soon as the door opened. When she turned to look back, she saw Driver, who just came out of his murderous fury, looking at her from within the elevator. Now came the best moment in the entire movie (in my opinion at least). Although he just saved Irene’s life, the look on Driver’s face was one of the deepest sorrow, because he knew that from now on Irene would always have this image of him as a murderer imprinted in her head. To protect her, he had no choice but to unleash the darkness within and watch it poison their relationship. The next second, the door of the elevator closed, separating the Driver and Irene, as if eternally.

Those were the things that set Drive apart from those action films that feature a hero and a damsel in distress that needs to be rescued. Drive may have a plot backbone that is shared with many other such films, but the depth of the main character and the way the depth was revealed and presented to us nevertheless make this movie a real gem.