Drive
Grade: B
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Christina Hendrick
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Free Access Granted
It boils down to this: Drive is a decent film but I find its critical adoration bordering on reactionary.
It’s fun to watch a team play in its throwback uniforms one game each year, and yes, Drive’s combination of sun-tinged neo-noir, eye-contact chemistry, gear grinding chases and silent leading man charisma makes chilling entertainment. But ever since its release at Cannes this May, the real attraction has been as a “man, they don’t make them like they used to” rallying point for filmmaking puritans, those who believe every good film was made before 1977 and see the current dominance of chaos cinema as a shooting offense.
These champions see the stripped-down action of Drive as a welcome course correction to that foreboding moment when Michael Bay was given a camera, possibly by Lucifer. As such there is a rush of hype to bill this Nicolas Winding Refn film as the future. In truth it is the opposite – a leather-glove grip on the past. Drive is cinematic oatmeal for those old-timers who just wish Tony Scott would quit doing donuts on their cleanly edited, visually elegant lawns.
Drive shares a number of plot points with one of the best examples of chaos cinema, Scott’s Man on Fire. A loner with a dark past finds his humanity through his surprise affection for a mother and child. When the poisonous vines of the underworld threaten the family, he fights nocturnal urban warfare to defend (or avenge) them. In Man on Fire, it’s a former CIA assassin in Mexico City. In Drive, it’s a mechanic and stuntman (Ryan Gosling) who drives getaways through the tangled Los Angeles streets at night.
Yet for all of its dream-like visual elegance and lean editing, Drive doesn’t have a lot to say. It attracts only the vague label of “existentialism” that often finds its way to quiet movies in which no one bother to name the main character. It doesn’t match the visual fever of Scott’s film, nor its moral provocation, nor its critique of the American view of the Third World, and not enough its aching heart.
I’ve written myself into a corner, because there is much about Drive to recommend. Refn’s hypnotic glaze simmers in the classic noir motif of a man against his fate in the indifferent city. Gosling makes the silence of the driver radioactive, and Mulligan enwraps years of suffering into a simple twitch of a lip. But as the film moves from cold style to heated violence, a rising cartoon tone undermines the alienated urban drama coming before. Not only does everyone turn out to be a killer – they all turn out to be experts at it, as if stabbing were passed down over firelight from father to son. Drive never quite decides whether it wants to be Taxi Driver or Dirty Harry, and is the less for its indecision.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
The Debt
The Debt
Grade: B
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Helen Mirren, Sam Worthington, Tom Wilkinson, Ciaran Hinds
Director: John Madden
Free Access Granted
Split between two settings, two time periods, and two casts, it’s no wonder that John Madden’s The Debt divides so easily into two levels of quality. There’s one part that I like to call a classy, sexy Cold War spy thriller. There’s another part that I like to call “the ending.”
Three Mossad agents share an apartment in East Berlin in 1966 – two men and a young woman. The cramped quarters in a hostile land breeds danger and romantic tension. Their job is to identify and take captive a Mengele-like Nazi doctor who tortured Jews in a concentration camp and blended back into society after the war. This leads to some of the creepiest moments in cinematic gynecology, as the young woman agent (Jessica Chastain of The Help and The Tree of Life) comes face to face (among other anatomical places) with the target.
The Debt is at its most convincing moments in this past, when it feels like the mature spy films and political thrillers of many years ago. The tension inside the apartment builds beautifully through looks, touches, and silences. Not for the first time, Chastain and Sam Worthington are particularly adept at saying a lot without saying much.
The sixties era feels like it should go on forever, or at least for two hours, whichever comes first. Unfortunately, it is bookended by the relative present (1997), in which Helen Mirren takes over for Chastain. The plot tries to pivot to issues of lies and regrets lingering from the mission. It’s here that The Debt goes from tight and plausible spy film to preposterous thriller with forced tensions.
It seems like the steady Madden (best known for Shakespeare in Love) and the writers are aware of the weaknesses and unsuccessfully try to shore them up with hackneyed suspense beats. If an already absurd scene of Mirren snooping through an office lacks tension, well then, let’s send in the after-hours canoodling couple to fool around. When you start trying to spread the jelly, it’s an admission that all you have is plain peanut butter.
The biggest hint that someone knows something is wrong – cars are everywhere. People entering cars, people leaving cars, quick stops, doors snapping open, ominous drives to ominous Ukrainian nowheres overlaid with ominous electronic music. As we reach a flat tire ending inside a Ukrainian mental hospital, it’s obvious that the spare isn’t the only thing being pulled out of the rear.
The automotive strangulation is so different from what’s so good about the sixties portion, so unforced and natural. Even being adapted from an Israeli movie, I would have considered removing a good portion of the modern story. I do recommend the film, but The Debt is a film where less would have been more.
Grade: B
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Helen Mirren, Sam Worthington, Tom Wilkinson, Ciaran Hinds
Director: John Madden
Free Access Granted
Split between two settings, two time periods, and two casts, it’s no wonder that John Madden’s The Debt divides so easily into two levels of quality. There’s one part that I like to call a classy, sexy Cold War spy thriller. There’s another part that I like to call “the ending.”
Three Mossad agents share an apartment in East Berlin in 1966 – two men and a young woman. The cramped quarters in a hostile land breeds danger and romantic tension. Their job is to identify and take captive a Mengele-like Nazi doctor who tortured Jews in a concentration camp and blended back into society after the war. This leads to some of the creepiest moments in cinematic gynecology, as the young woman agent (Jessica Chastain of The Help and The Tree of Life) comes face to face (among other anatomical places) with the target.
The Debt is at its most convincing moments in this past, when it feels like the mature spy films and political thrillers of many years ago. The tension inside the apartment builds beautifully through looks, touches, and silences. Not for the first time, Chastain and Sam Worthington are particularly adept at saying a lot without saying much.
The sixties era feels like it should go on forever, or at least for two hours, whichever comes first. Unfortunately, it is bookended by the relative present (1997), in which Helen Mirren takes over for Chastain. The plot tries to pivot to issues of lies and regrets lingering from the mission. It’s here that The Debt goes from tight and plausible spy film to preposterous thriller with forced tensions.
It seems like the steady Madden (best known for Shakespeare in Love) and the writers are aware of the weaknesses and unsuccessfully try to shore them up with hackneyed suspense beats. If an already absurd scene of Mirren snooping through an office lacks tension, well then, let’s send in the after-hours canoodling couple to fool around. When you start trying to spread the jelly, it’s an admission that all you have is plain peanut butter.
The biggest hint that someone knows something is wrong – cars are everywhere. People entering cars, people leaving cars, quick stops, doors snapping open, ominous drives to ominous Ukrainian nowheres overlaid with ominous electronic music. As we reach a flat tire ending inside a Ukrainian mental hospital, it’s obvious that the spare isn’t the only thing being pulled out of the rear.
The automotive strangulation is so different from what’s so good about the sixties portion, so unforced and natural. Even being adapted from an Israeli movie, I would have considered removing a good portion of the modern story. I do recommend the film, but The Debt is a film where less would have been more.
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