Review: Drive (18,100 minutes) **** (From York Press)

Review: Drive (18,100 minutes) ****

7:20am Friday 23rd September 2011 in Film reviews By Charles Hutchinson

NOT since Saving Private Ryan has a long, silent opening to a film said so much to set the atmosphere.

Very different films, of course, and no further comparison is needed, but what that ten-minute silence does in Drive is establish both the lead character’s loner status and the supreme confidence of Nicolas Winding Refn’s direction of this bravura action-thriller, adapted from the novel by James Sallis.

In flavour-of-the-moment Ryan Gosling’s second new film of the week, he plays a flint-eyed, speed-junkie Hollywood stunt man who moonlights as a getaway driver. He is in full moonlighting mode at the start, chewing on a toothpick, eyes and ears alert to the chasing police cars and helicopter lights as he escorts two robbers through the Los Angeles streets to the safety of a crowded car park. Rapid camerawork and Cliff Martinez’s foreboding score are crucial to the rising tension that never bursts.

Driver by job, Driver by name, he combines days on big-budget action-movie sets with down time as a mechanic for garage owner Shannon (Bryan Cranston), the link man for his nefarious nocturnal high-speed engagements for the criminal world. Little time is left for sleep, as his pallor testifies.

Yet he is drawn to bonny Irene (Carey Mulligan), the young mother in a neighbouring apartment, building a bond with her boy Benicio (Kaden Leos) while husband Standard Gabriel (Oscatr Isaac) is doing time.

Standard’s release from prison is the trigger for trouble. He owes protection money and Driver feels obliged to drive the car that will speed him from his robbery of a pawn shop, but it all goes wrong, setting Driver on a collision course with crime hoods Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) and Nino (Ron Perlman).

Unlike Mulligan’s Irene, it is not a pretty sight, and Refn does not hold back from the pummelling violence and brutality as Driver’s world turns ever darker, the more the conflict spirals out of control – and yet throughout the taciturn outsider is as methodical and calculated and daring as his driving.

Gosling and Mulligan spark up the electricity in Driver and Irene’s ill-fated romance that was lacking in his relationship with Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine last year, while Brooks and Perlman’s hoodlums evoke memories of Martin Scorsese’s bunch of Goodfellas.

Director Refn steers this breathless thriller to the finishing line with the skill and nerve of a stunt driver.