Adventures in the Talkies: Drive

There will come a time in the life of every girl--either a true girl of age 12-18, or a girl at heart--when she, pursuing the love of a movie star crush, will see a movie that fills her heart with regret and her head full of horrible, horrible images.

(I have wracked my brain attempting trying to think of a good example, but all I can come up with is seeing Tommy Lee Jones in Cobb, and that wasn't exactly what I'm going for. It's too bad Kirk Cameron didn't make some arthouse grodo film like Natural Born Killers... damn it, Tommy Lee Jones! Why are you my every example today?)

Anyway, the point is: Kate and I went to Drive a few days ago. We went because not long ago, we saw Crazy, Stupid Love, and tee hee Ryan Gosling... 

I thought I had done enough "reading up" on the film. Yay, Ryan Gosling is going to be psychotic! I saw that in Murder by Numbers, and that movie was good-time fun! There will also be driving and Albert Brooks!

All of those things are true, I suppose. There is Ryan Gosling, whose Charles Bronsonesque character clearly isn't what you'd call normal in the first 30+ minutes of the film, but when he goes into psychotic mode, it's not "ha ha ha witty young buck who licks Sandra Bullock" psychotic. It's more like "AHHHHHHHHHHHH!" watching through fingers, did-he-just-stomp-that-man's-head-into-mush psychotic. You know: not the enjoyable kind of psychotic.

But maybe it's just me. I've gotten more and more squeamish as I've aged. I used to watch Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street and the several sequels to Psycho (but never Hellraiser, because that Pinhead freaks my shit out), but somewhere along the way, I lost my ability to tolerate gore. And this kind of gore, presented after a setup of ambient music, sun-spackled courting, and I-should-have-known-it-was-eerie stretches of silence just had a brutal, horrifying feel that I couldn't shake even an hour or so after I'd left the theater.

I did like what they did with light. In one scene, Driver is practically encased in shadow while the rest of the scene has natural light, and it was a visual tipoff that our lead character was a moral black hole. And the slo-mo scene before the head-stomping (eesh) in the elevator was breathtaking. Carey Mulligan should demand to be lit like the Lady of the Lake in every movie. But anytime I find myself saying something admiring about the art of the film, I immediately want to follow it with "brrrrrrrrr." So...brrrrrrrrrrrr.

Albert Brooks was incredible. He has that edge he showed in Out of Sight, only of a less wormy, more terrifying variety. I wouldn't go so far as to call his character or performance "genial," and I don't think Brooks was going for "hey, despite all the horrible shit I've done and am about to do, I'm a swell guy," but he was funny and seems to genuinely like Sheldon and, to some extent, Driver. But his affection, particularly for Sheldon was hardly comforting when he was--spoiler alert--opening up his arm with a razor blade.

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I don't know. I guess Drive is one of those movies, like Requiem for a Dream, where I can say, "I saw that. It was...well-made." And I'll likely never, ever, ever, ever see it again.