A ghost-like, hypnotic unreality permeates much of Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive. The film's LA is not in California but in a dream world where people are not individuals but archetypes, 5 minutes is not 5 minutes, and driving is not driving. The characters are quieter, often only speaking out of necessity for themselves and not the audience, as if words were an endangered species and not to be wasted. Time is slower but perception is more immediate. The world unfolds as a slower pace (often in slow motion) but with brighter hues and deeper shades to accentuate the frame. Several minutes pass by without significant passages of dialogue or even ambient noise. The pervasive solitude creates a sense of both patience and unease – the pace is methodical but guarantees periodic, sudden sometimes violent interruption. The existential appeal of such factors is often a highlight of European films moreso than American cinema. When Albert Brooks as a shadowy loan shark admits that he use to make action movies that “one critic called 'European'” but he thought they were “shit,” the filmmakers are acknowledging the uneasy (to some) marriage they have formed of muscle car heroics and French New Wave psychology.
From the film's first scene, one detects precise craftsmanship and visual storytelling. Opening on an intricately devised map with numerous routes and shortcuts sketched through streets and down alleys, we sense an attempt to bring order out of chaos. Gosling's first line (“There are 100,000 streets in this city”) echoes what the map and Michael Mann films have shown for over a decade – that LA is a journey rather than a destination. The city attracts outsiders and hardened criminals only because its sprawling, rootless condition allows the predators of the world to hide in plain sight. Because Gosling is driving a Chevy Impala, the most popular car in California, his boss Shannon tells him, “no one will be looking at you.” Even as the camera pans from the map to Gosling, we face his back and only see his face in the window's reflection. As if even that is too intimate, the camera quickly looks away and instead shows us his dimly lit, Spartan accommodations that he calls home.
Among many touches borrowed from Taxi Driver, the camera often moves and avoids direct emotional confrontation with the protagonist at his barest, most vulnerable moments. We see him mostly in reflections because, like a wraith, we're never sure if we're seeing the real him or just another shade. When out of the car, Refn uses long and wide shots to fill the frame and de-emphasize Driver's importance. However, when in the car, he is cast as a titan in low angle grandeur but half shrouded in the darkness of the night. Similar to Travis Bickle, he is a creature of the night that when shown in profile with alternating red and blue fields of light appears even less human and more threatening. He is simultaneously larger than life and less than life-like.
Like Jef Costello, Le Samourai, Gosling's Driver is a process more than a man. Trivialities such as entertainment, enjoyment, friends and decent lighting do not factor into his existence. As a stunt man, he casually signs his life away on a liability insurance form for the studio in a way that is not human. While others enjoy a party, he sits in the dark and pieces together a machine – another symbolic attempt to bring order to chaos. He seems most keen on adopting the persona of Hollywood star. He wears a jacket with a Scorpion on it and is never without a toothpick hanging from his lips like Sylvester Stallone in Cobra. Whether it's donning bare knuckle, leather gloves or the prosthetic face of a leading man, Driver loves pretending. He pretends to be a mechanic to his boss, he pretends to be a disinterested neighbor to the newly paroled ex-con, he pretends to be an LA Clippers fan, he pretends to be a stunt driver (“only part-time”) and he pretends to be normal to everyone. He is all of these things and he is none of them. There is a brilliant cut to a tracking shot that follows Gosling moments after the initial successful robbery where he is revealed to be a police officer, but only for a few seconds until we realize he is a thief pretending to be stunt man pretending to be a cop.
Early in the film, there is a scene with Benecio that indirectly highlights his character's ambiguity. They are both sitting on the couch with the same parallel look of child-like wonder while watching a cartoon. Gosling, continuing to emulate adolescent behavior in this scene, asks Benecio questions about good guys and bad guys in the show. He wonder if the shark in the cartoon can be trusted (“He's a shark.” “There's no good sharks?” “No.”) and Benecio answers, “I mean just look at him, does he look like a good guy to you?”
The same question could and should be asked of Driver by all of the other characters. Until this point in the film, we've only seen him as a criminal with fleeting dreams of domesticity. He does not smile nor engage in small talk. He only acts with purpose toward a designed end usually for profit. Down to the minute, he is a perfectionist that never appears out of his element or off plan. His every action is performed with the habitual rigidity of a mechanic – and a mechanic. While driving with finely-tuned mechanics, he never displays a hint of hesitation, an ounce of fear, or a glimpse of humanity. Like the shark in the cartoon, he is a predator.
But like the criminal antagonists of other notable LA crime dramas, Heat and Collateral, he is an honorable, if immoral, predator. He has principles and a code that he lives by even if we are never privy to it. Driver is like the cars that he works on (the Impala and the race car): he's just a ordinary, blank shell but one that has been modified internally to make it more powerful, more valuable and more unpredictable. He welds a balled up fist and a menacing, accusatory finger to Christina Hendricks more dangerously than his counterparts do shotguns and knives. Unlike even Tom Stall in A History of Violence, though his past was likely bloody and crime-filled, it never ventures into his present and the film's narrative (probably because he has killed everyone that would know).
After enjoying a few days and sharing a goodbye kiss with Irene amidst all the carnage, the film tries to project that he is a new man with a new lease on humanity. The final song announces over and over again that he's seemingly transformed from a monster into a “real human being” and a “real hero.” He has finally made order out of the chaos of his life. But at film's end, he's back on the road, behind the wheel, and under the glare of red and blue light, presumably on the way to another city to continue his journey as the man with no name and the man with no past. It's only fitting that when you're in the business of “driving,” “for the rest of your life, you're going to be looking over your shoulder.”
