Director Nicolas Winding Refn won the best director's trophy at last year's Cannes Film Festival for "Drive," and it's not hard to see why. It's a highly stylized take on the traditional heist movie, with a protagonist (Ryan Gosling) who is never named and barely speaks.
There is dialogue in "Drive," most notably from Albert Brooks playing a local mob kingpin whose chatty, congenial surface hides a razor-ship killer instinct.
But for the most part, this is a movie built on visuals, where long gazes and pulsing music substitute a distinct mood instead of the characters explaining to us what's happening.
The driver works as a mechanic in a broken-down car shop run by Shannon (Bryan Cranston), who's got a gimpy leg and a chip on his shoulder. Shannon sets him up doing car crashes for Hollywood movies. On his own, the driver has his own side gig: wheel man for robberies and such.
Things grow complicated with the arrival of Irene (Carey Mulligan), the new neighbor in his apartment building. She's got a young son, a husband in jail, and trouble written all over her.
For a guy whose entire existence is about carefully managing risk, having his carefully ordered world twisted inside-out plays hell on the driver. His placid demeanor begins to crack, as he finds himself thrown off his own map.
The film feels unstuck from time. Driver wears a gold scorpion jacket that could have come from the late '50s, and Brooks' character could have been a contemporary of Bugsy Siegal. The music and credit titles are out of the 1980s, and the cars range from the muscle era to contemporary.
With its sleek throwback atmosphere -- think "Miami Vice" put through a time-warp blender -- punctuated by moments of horrid violence, "Drive" is a crime drama in overdrive.
Video features are decent enough, though one feels the filmmakers never made an effort to find their high gear when it came to giving the goodies to its audience.
There are four making-of featurettes: "I Drive," "Under the Hood," "Driver and Irene" and "Cut to the Chase." There is also an interview with Refn and ... that's it.
"Drive" is a movie stuck out of time. For at least the first 30 minutes, I was convinced the story was set in the 1980s. The plethora of vintage cars, an '80s-ish soundtrack and the gold-on-white scorpion jacket worn by the main character seemed to spring forth from "Miami Vice" crossed with "Less Than Zero."
Even the titles are in neon-hued cursive.
But eventually the presence of cell phones and a late-model Mustang clue us in that the time is the present. Director Nicolas Winding Refn constructs a world in which eras meld into each other, so mobsters seemingly from the 1950s do not seem out of place.
Like "Valhalla Riding," Refn's last film, "Drive" is long on mood and sleek visuals, and the narrative seems merely a slender frame upon which to hang the director's highly stylized dressings. It's basically a tone poem set against the backdrop of a fairly standard crime-heist-gone-awry frame, punctuated by over-the-top violence that burst a carefully-cultivated bubble of serenity.
Ryan Gosling, as the never-named protagonist, utters very little dialogue. He's a mechanic who moonlights as a Hollywood stunt driver, and his other other job is wheelman for hire. He lays out his rules simply but with certainty: He will take his clients wherever they want to go and give them a five-minute window for whatever they need to do. He will carry no gun, and one tick on his watch after five minutes and he's gone.
The driver is very good behind the wheel of a car, of course, but we suspect there are others equally skilled. He also seems more than capable when a tussle is necessary, without knowing any fancy martial arts or hand-to-hand combat skills. No, the driver's main ability is to focus on whatever he's doing with a ferocious singularity, so that in that moment it is very hard for anyone to match against him.
Forty years ago, it's the sort of role Steve McQueen would've played.
Things seem to going well for the driver. He's got a good reputation on movie sets for getting the right crash shot without any wrinkles. And his boss at the garage, Shannon (Bryan Cranston), wants to set him up on the racing circuit with the backing of a benevolent local wiseguy named Bernie, played with chilling congeniality by funnyman Albert Brooks.
Then at his new apartment he bumps into neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), a single mother to young Benicio (Kaden Leos). Their courtship, if you can even call it that, is a series of long glances and shy exchanges of pleasantries. Somehow, with a few slow-mo shots and evocative performances by his two stars, director Refn manages to imply a depth of feeling that isn't written down on any page.
Then Irene's husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) is released from prison, setting up a series of debacles that put everything at risk.
The driver's smooth mien begins to crack, as his entire life is a series of highly calculated risks. But this new chaos is something new and troubling to him. It's something he can't control, and that unnerves him.
Hossein Amini wrote the script for "Drive," based on the book by James Sallis, unread by me. Somehow I suspect the text for this movie wouldn't have amounted to much without the sumptuous, occasionally distracting style of director Refn. It very much reminded me of the work of Michael Mann, whose visuals could overpower a bare-bones story.
(Refn won the best director award at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.)
But this is the sort of film that says much more than the scant spoken words of its anti-hero. Like the scorpion totem he wears on his back, the driver cannot deny the hardened core of his nature. That allows him to accomplish things few men can, but the cost is exacted in doors that are forever closed to him.
"Valhalla Rising" starts out in an interesting place, and goes to a less interesting place. This Danish/British production (in English) is the evocative tale of One Eye, a gladiator slave to the Vikings who has no history, nothing to say, and has no identity beyond his ability to kill, which borders on the supernatural. We wonder how it was that he lost that eye, since it would seem to indicate someone got the better of him in combat, at least temporarily.
Based on the bouts we witness, this would not seem possible. One Eye fights at a disadvantage, his neck chained to a post, since the Vikings will not risk him getting free. It matters not. During one match, two opponents cheat by attacking him simultaneously, before his hands have even been untied, and yet he still prevails handily.
The Viking chieftains pass around ownership of One Eye every few years, like some treasure too valuable for any one of them to possess permanently. There's some tension because his current master has held onto him for what the others feel is too long.
Forced to sell him for want of money, the chieftain's last conversation with One Eye is revealing: "Who are you?" As always, no answer is received. After more than five years, he knows nothing about the silent warrior.
Mads Mikkelsen -- who sported another freakish eye prosthetic in "Casino Royale" -- plays One Eye with a stoic calm. There's a mystic quality to the man, who has visions limned in red fire that often come to pass.
His only friend, if you can call it that, is the boy (Maarten Stevenson) who brings him food. He's the only one who will go into One Eye's cage, perhaps because the Vikings believe he will not kill a mere boy, or perhaps because the lad's life has so little value to them that they wouldn't care if he did.
Director Nicolas Winding Refn, who co-wrote the screenplay with Roy Jacobsen, shoots these early scenes with an amazing dream-like quality. The looming hills are perpetually shrouded in mist, and the men who traipse between them seem like the only humans on earth. The Vikings, their apparel and weapons, is astonishingly authentic -- grimy, battered, utilitarian.
One Eye finally breaks his bonds -- in his typically brutal, blood-spurting way, which Refn does not shirk his gaze away from-- and the boy decides to follow him. The chieftain predicts that he will return to wreak vengeance upon them, surmising that he's a man consumed by hatred.
Perhaps this was his intention, but then a strange encounter happens: One Eye and the boy come across some Christian Vikings who are on their way to Jerusalem to free it from the infidels. Upon realizing who he is, they invite One Eye to join them on their holy quest. Religion -- whether pagan or Christian -- is not part of One Eye's shtick, but nonetheless he accompanies them.
(The Christians also had a dozen or so women in their custody, kept naked and huddled, whose origin and disposition after they've left is never hinted it. They would seem to be sex slaves, and how that fits with the Vikings' professed faith is left deliberately vague.)
The mini-Crusade gets stuck at sea for weeks in a blanket of mist, no wind or current, and thirst and hunger grow dire. Divisions rise up between the men, fueled by superstition about curses, and there are some deaths.
They finally reach land, but not a Holy one. It's a lush forest of hills and stones -- America, perhaps, or even Australia? There are cairns holding corpses that could be either Native American or Aborigine in origin.
I won't say too much more about what happens, other than the film shirks off its narrative cohesion, like a reptile shedding its skin, and becomes more of a contemplative tone poem -- less "Braveheart" than "Aguirre, The Wrath of God." The boy, who had been acting as interpreter for One Eye (though we suspect he was faking it), becomes the oracle of an earthbound god pronouncing his judgment on those that remain.
The last half of the movie is strange, loopy and doesn't seem to fit with the first half. Still, I enjoyed the relentless moodiness of the film, and its redolent images. I don't think it's for everyone, but its contemplation of the convergence between violence and faith is certainly never dull.
One Eye in some ways is a Celtic cousin of Mad Max, roaming an unknown wasteland after his purpose for living has disappeared. There is only survival, although eventually that becomes less important, too.
DVD extras are practically non-existent, limited to a theatrical trailer.
